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Title: The Battles that Changed History Date of first publication: 1956 Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
Garden City, NY: Dolphin, 1956 (paperback)Author: Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956) Date first posted: 4 January 2008 Date last updated: 4 January 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #56

THE BATTLES THAT CHANGED HISTORY

A Few Words In
Introduction

Viewing a wide and accidented landscape, it is sometimes
necessary to half close the eyes to determine what are the most
important features involved. If one is to make any sense of history
as a whole, the process is somewhat similar. Putting in all details
and qualifications adds up to accuracy and is indispensable for
analysis, but often leads to analysis of minor features only and
prevents the perception of the really outstanding features, around
whose sides cluster so liberal an accumulation of minutiae.

The present volume is a half-closed-eye view of one aspect of
Western history. From such a viewpoint one of the most striking
features of Western European culture has been its ability to
achieve decisive results by military means. It may even be the
critical factor, the reason why that culture has encircled the
world. Not that the Far East and Africa have been lacking in great
battles or great victories, but their results have had less
permanent effect on the stream of world history. The conquests of
China are a classic case; they resulted in nothing but the
absorption of the victors, and the resultant cultural pattern was
transmitted only to the narrowest range of peripheral areas. The
seepage through the Afghan passes into India would have taken place
without any accompaniment of military events, and more importantly,
did little either to change the basic patterns of Indian life or to
extend them to other areas. The genuinely decisive wars began when
the peoples of Western European culture (and those who acquired it
by osmosis, like the Arabs) discovered that it was possible to
change the course of history on the battlefield.

There will be ample room for disagreement as to the choice of
the battles named here as decisive, and it is therefore worth while
explaining the basis on which the choices were made. The first
criterion was that the war in which the battle took place must
itself have decided something, must really mark one of those
turning points after which things would been a good deal different
if the decision had gone in the other direction. It would be
possible, for instance, to introduce a battle or two from World War
I, and on the technical side to discuss the vast changes that
conflict made in the ideology and technique of combat; but the war
itself decided nothing, and it had to be fought all over again in
twenty years. Moreover, certain decisions taken in battle have
turned out to be reversible. Tsushima is an instance; anyone
writing this book in 1930 might well have set it down as decisive,
and someone did; but the subsequent course of history has not
allowed this to be the case.

The second requirement in compilation was that the battle in
question represent a positive decision. History is full of
negatives, of things prevented from happening. Creasy’s
Fifteen Decisive Battles, the first book in the series of
which this is a member, includes Chalons and Tours, fought only a
small distance apart, both of which were preventive decisions. But
the special genius of Western European culture when it takes up
arms is that for really changing the course of history in battle,
not merely arresting a movement, but completely altering its
direction. The battles described all did this, regardless of
whatever subjective regrets one may have in the individual
case.

It was also necessary to impose a limitation to keep this from
being a general military history of the Western world,
approximately as long as the Encyclopedia Britannica. This
limitation was achieved by omitting all those cases where the
battle or campaign, although decisive, could hardly have had any
other result, given the forces engaged. There will doubtless be
some disagreement as to the choices on this ground also, but the
point may be illustrated by the case of the Battle of Tenochtitlan,
in which Cortes overthrew and the empire of the Aztecs. In view of
the small number of Spaniards engaged, there was certainly an
element of doubt about the outcome of the immediate operation, and
Tenochtitlan was preceded by a battle which was definitely a
Spanish defeat. But the European technical and logistic background
was so superior, with the seagoing ship, the horse, the sword, the
musket, armor, and knowledge of how to use all five, that even if
Cortes’ force had been destroyed it would have been no more
than an accident in the tide of conquest.

The sweep of the Vikings over England had a similar
inevitability, not through superior technological equipment, but
more efficient social organization. Hastings decided nothing but
the names of the Norman families that were to rule England, and the
change in basic system was really very slight. In the reverse case
the decaying Byzantine Empire could have been preserved against the
Turks only by a decisive victory which never took place, and the
Battle of Manzikert, generally taken as the deathblow of that
empire, merely confirmed an existing trend.

The battles listed here may thus be described as decisive in a
counterdeterminist sense. Not all of them reversed existing
tendencies, although this is a very common case among the battles
chosen. It is quite clear that the absorptive power of the ancient
Persian Empire on Greek civilization could have been neutralized
only in battle; as it was, after Alexander’s victory at
Arbela the absorption was turned in the other direction.

The question then became one of the extent of the absorptive
power of the Greek system. It is often held that the severest test
of the Roman system came in the great struggle with Carthage, but I
think that close examination will not allow this to be the case.
Carthage was a tremendous opponent and she was served by one of the
greatest geniuses of military history, but the fundamental
structure beneath the Carthaginian effort was flawed. Defeats for
Carthage were always disasters; defeats for Rome only called forth
more effort from the incomparably strong and resilient polity that
supported the effort. That polity was menaced only once, at
Beneventum, when it came in contact with the Greek system that was
the heritage of Alexander, and which itself contained elements of
permanence that the Carthaginian system never had.

After this the development of the Roman Empire was inevitable;
all the battles, however otherwise decisive, were made up of
predetermined elements. There is no real point at which one can say
that the basic structure of Western civilization was altered by a
single event, off the battlefield or on it, for many generations.
Even the failure of the Roman effort to conquer Germany was in the
cards; the Romans never developed a real technique of forest
warfare, and it would have taken a decisive battle, which did not
occur, to change matters. The Nike sedition, the first true crisis,
the point at which there might have been a fundamental change,
occurred late in the game (532 A.D.), and in Constantinople, which
had already become the seat of whatever Rome there was left.

After this more than one deluge came down and beneath them the
long ground swell of the barbarian invasions or, more properly,
infiltrations. It was an age rich in changes and personalities, but
not one in which there were basic changes in the cultural pattern.
One can point to developments, but to no such abrupt shift of
direction and emphasis as that following Arbela. When the Battle of
Kadisiyah did effect a change, it was at a tangent to the flow and
not a reversal; and it is necessary to understand Kadisiyah to
comprehend why the newly risen power of Islam became a threat to
the developing European system. That threat was brought to a halt
in Western Europe through Spain for reasons explained in the text;
it was the reversal of the threat in this area and the manner of
the reversal that counted.

Far more serious for the West was the Islamic drive up the
Danube valley, where the Turks had developed not only a better
military system than any Islamic predecessors, but a
military-political system capable of indefinite expansion. Vienna
was a reversal of tendency; when the tide rolled back down the
Danube, there passed with it the last chance that an exterior
system would be imposed on the European, and the decisions
henceforth were within variations of that Western European
culture.

The farther we are from the peaks, the higher they must be to
become visible. After Vienna the line is easier to follow, the
parts become more integrated. It is possible that the story of the
relief of Orleans should have been placed in that later complex
instead of where it is set down for chronological reasons. But this
would have involved pulling out of position one of the key facts in
connection with Vienna, that the Turk was a greater danger to
Charles V than the Protestant Reformation.

No apology is offered for construing the term
“battle” in a rather loose sense. Not all military
decisions have hinged on the result of a single clash of arms. The
Vicksburg campaign is the best illustration; it was thoroughly
decisive, but none of the five battles can be said to have done
more than emphasize the character of the campaign itself. The
abiding interest is in the command decisions and the rush of
Grant’s hurrying columns, so disposed that at every contact
Union forces were in the field in numbers that made victory a
foregone conclusion.

If it seems that a considerable proportion of the battles cited
deal with the American scene, it can be replied that the emergence
of the United States as a world power is one of the great facts of
history as it stands today. The emergence of the Soviet Union is
another; but the decisions in favor of that entity were seldom made
on the battlefield (which, after all, does not determine
everything), and the record in many cases has been so deliberately
befouled for propaganda purposes that no honest account can be
given.

1. ARBELA AND THE MAN WHO
WOULD BE GOD

I

The Greeks had to go imperial to make it stand up.

This was something that Demosthenes, like many liberals
insulated within the circle of his own rightness, failed to
understand. He was a genius and he spoke in the name of an
admirable ideal: the ideal of democracy, that the state is the
collective will of all its individual components, achieving the
united decision through free discussion. What he failed to see was
that even in Athens this remained an unattained ideal, a precarious
balance subject to destructive forces both from above and below,
from within and without.

The achievement of Athens in the arts, philosophy, every
intellectual pursuit, was magnificent and the democratic ideal was
always present, but she was no more of a real democracy than
Renaissance Florence, where there was also intellectual
achievement. Democracy was in the hands of a small body of citizen
voters, an island in the vast sea of slaves, metics, and
unnaturalizable residents of exterior origin. There was a fatal
inconsistency in Demosthenes’ doctrine; his banner might more
accurately have read, “Democracy—for Athenians
only”. Athens differed from Sparta, frankly an oligarchy,
only in cultivating things of the spirit and in placing the fewer
restrictions on the personal habits of the individual. To be sure,
this subtended enormous cultural differences, but they were not
political differences, and the important decisions were made in the
political field.

By its self-imposed limitations the Athenian democracy was
incapable of real cooperation with any other state. It could form
alliances, but only on a strictly temporary basis and in the face
of imminent danger. It could take a place in no organization larger
than itself, for this would involve the recognition of exteriors as
equals, and the whole theory of Athenian democracy was that no one
else had reached or could reach its own level. When Athens formed a
league, it was the League of Delos, and its members were subjects.
They were admitted to the sacred company of Greeks, the only
civilized people in the world, but as second-class Greeks, like the
lumpish Boeotians or the soft Corinthians.

This was not merely provincialism; there was in it a certain
pride of attainment, and the general view, both at the time and
since, has been that the attainment was very real. The narrowed
view of democracy, however, did deprive Athens of one of the
specific advantages of democracy—its defense mechanism. A
monarchy or dictatorship is in a very happy position at the
beginning of a war; it has unified command, the coordination of all
efforts to a single purpose, and unlimited control of resources.
But the experience of the ages has been that in the long run these
do not overmaster the resilience of democracy, its ability to adopt
on a temporary basis whatever variations from the norm of practice
may be needed for military efficiency, and the ease with which
ability makes its way to the top through the looser structure of a
democratic organization. In the closed circuit of Athenian
democracy ability did not find it easy to reach the top or to stay
there, and nobody thought of looking for it in a slave or a metic.
Resilience was wanting; Sparta, organized for total war, had more
of it.

The defense mechanism is always necessary. That of the Greek
city states as a group grew out of the very thing that made their
democracy imperfect—the common recognition of all as Greeks,
possessing the homonoia, and having a common duty to help
each other against the great, menacing world of the barbarians. The
mechanism worked reasonably well for a time, thanks to several
factors. One of these was psychological: the devotion of every
Greek to his own city, his own group; his relation of mutual
reliance within that circle to the homonoia, and its
relation to him. Two factors were technical: the development of
good iron armor, good iron spears and swords; and the fact that
these were made to a common pattern, permitting the employment of
groups of identically armed men as units. One was tactical: the
fact that out of the mutual reliance the Greeks had learned to
march in step.

The last came to the fore at Marathon in 490BCE, and at Plataea
in 479 it was decisive. In both battles the Asiatics, strong and
courageous men, made their fight in the manner tribesmen usually
do, in little knots of ten or a dozen, rushing one part of the line
or another. At the point of contact they were always outnumbered by
the Greek infantry, all in line, they were outreached by the long
pikes, they could not get through Greek armor when they did close
and, with light targets that would keep out an arrow but not much
more and no body armor, had little defense of their own. At
Marathon the Persians were driven in rout; at Plataea they were
crushed, and even that cavalry which was the pride of Persia could
make nothing of the hedge of spears.

Yet Thermopylae, Salamis, Marathon, Plataea were not decisive
battles. In each case they decided nothing but that Greek
civilization would not be submerged this time, and they determined
nothing but the fact that the Greeks had developed a highly
superior tactical technique. The Greek victories were backed by
nothing so permanent as the fact that the conquest of Indians by
whites in America was supported by a technology which could produce
muskets and swords. Persians as well as Greeks could manufacture
iron armor and eight-foot pikes and train men to use them; the
Persians were quite as capable as Greeks of learning how to march
in step, and some of them did when they found out what a good trick
it was.

Even devotion was no monopoly; and in the century that followed
Plataea the Greek kind began sensibly to decline through the long
series of conflicts that collectively bear the name of
Peloponnesian and Corinthian wars. The citizen-solider turned out
to save his home, but as it began to require almost daily salvation
over a period of years, he became more of a solider and less of a
citizen, and in the intervals of peace that spaced with those of
combat, he tended to find he had no home and become a
mercenary.

It is unnecessary to go into the complicated history of that
century. But the main line is clear: Greece was gradually
succumbing to Persia, not by force of arms—which had been
defeated—but from the political impact of a system which
could digest small units into larger ones. Under Xenophon, 10,000
Greeks marched through Asia Minor without anyone’s being able
to stop them, but they were mercenaries in Persian pay. When Sparta
established her hegemony in the Greek world, it was overthrown
among the islands at the Battle of Cnidus in 394 by a Greek fleet;
but the fleet was paid from Persia and at least technically under
the command of a Persian satrap. In the “King’s
Peace” of 386 the Greek cities of continental Asia Minor were
turned over unconditionally to Persia, and perpetual Persian
interference in Greek affairs was recognized as a right. Sparta,
Thebes, and even Athens successively took Persian money for the
furtherance of projects which in the long run could benefit only
Persia.

That is, for all the formidable character of their armies and
the skill with which they were used, the Greeks had found no answer
to the Persian system of government, its way of life on high
levels. They were becoming adsorbed to it, and the process would
become absorption as soon as Greek internal conflicts had produced
sufficient weakness. The collective defense mechanism of the Greek
culture was failing and had, indeed, already failed.

II

In 367 a younger son of the King of Macedon, named Philip, was
sent to Thebes as a hostage to guarantee the good behavior of his
father’s turbulent little kingdom toward the Greek cities along the
coast. Thebes spoke for them because she was enjoying a brief
period of leadership. Four years before at Leuctra the Thebans had
inflicted an utterly astonishing defeat on one of those hitherto
invincible Spartan armies, killing the king who led it and ending
Sparta’s lordship in continental Greece, as it had earlier been
lost among the islands.

The whole air of Thebes at this date was electric, and there
must have been a good deal of discussion of how the Theban farmers
had pulled off their incredible feat. It was due to their general
(and leading statesman) Epaminondas, people said. Confronted by
that Spartan army, the very announcement of whose approach produced
utter despondency in his home city, he did not draw out the hoplite
infantry in parallel order, as the custom was. Instead he deployed
the best of his men into a massive column, fifty men deep, on the
left wing, and flung it well forward before the rest of the armies
could close. This huge battering-ram of men sheared through the
crushed the Spartan right, and all the Spartans not left on the
ground were soon going somewhere else.

It was as simple as that to most of them. Probably the
fifteen-year-old boy from Macedon was one of the few who saw that
it was not quite as simple as that, that before the huge block of
Thebans made contact there had been some sharp cavalry fighting in
the wings and the Theban horse, which was always very good, had
driven off the Spartan cavalry, which was always very weak, then
turned in on the flank of the enemy line just as the Theban
battering-ram struck it. It was the sort of observation the
fifteen-year-old boy would make; he belonged to a race whose
princes made war their only profession, partly through force of
circumstances and partly because they liked it.

The Greeks generally regarded Macedonians and not quite in the
homonoia; barbarians who had acquired a veneer of Greek
culture and spoke a Greek dialect. In fact, they were mainly Dorian
Greeks who had stopped off in the plains of the Haliacmon during
the great southern movement of the tribes and intermarried a little
with the original inhabitants. The intermarriage was nowhere near
as extensive as that of the southern-going Dorians with the
Achaeans who preceded them, and the Macedonians never did
participate in the movement from the eighth century to the fifth,
in which the city states developed various forms of aristocracy,
oligarchy, and democracy. Politically Macedon was intensely
conservative; it kept the old king-and-council system and the
people thought of themselves as Macedonians, not citizens of the
towns of Pella or Larissa. This was one of the things that made
them un-Greek.

Philip’s Theban visit lasted three years. He returned to
Macedon, was given a small and remote province to govern, and
proceeded to grow up a vivid, rip-roaring blade, with strong taste
for women (he rather rapidly accumulated six wives) and a still
stronger one for wine. There is something very like the Vikings
about all the Macedonians, and most especially about Philip; the
hoopla attracted attention, and nobody noticed that underneath it
he was making some rather remarkable alterations in the army of his
province, or that no matter how much of a hangover he had in the
morning he was out drilling with the troops.

In 359, when Philip was twenty-three, his elder brother, King
Perdiccas, was killed in a fight with some Lyncestian highlanders,
leaving an infant son and a formidable harridan of a queen mother,
who had been regent before and wanted to be again. This sort of
thing was not new in Macedonian history, and all the surrounding
hill tribes—Illyrians from the west, Lyncestians and
Paeonians from the north, Thracians from the east—moved in to
collect the usual plunder from the cities of the plain while the
royal family was weak. A Macedonian king—again like a
Viking—was supposed to be a military leader; the council of
higher nobles asked Philip to take the crown, a step doubtless
encouraged by his own previous arrangements.

He bought off the Paeonians and Thracians by money payments,
drove out the Lyncestians with the normal local levies, and secured
the support of Athens (temporarily dominant in Greece) by ceding
any right he had to their revolted colony of Amphipolis; the rest
would have to wait. That winter Philip opened up a gold mine at
Mount Pangaeus to fill up his treasury, a key event, then sent to
south Greece and Greek Italy for technical experts, and began
organizing and drilling his army.

The completion of that last process took years, and owed
something to what he had learned from the Thebans and a good deal
to what he heard from people who were not Thebans; but the
essential elements in it were Philip’s own, and the most essential
of these were that it was the first standing army in the world,
based on universal service, and that it was the first army in the
world that did not take local levies just as they came, but
deliberately trained for and combined all arms.

The core of this new model was the phalanx of heavy infantry:
they were armed with a longsword and a spear, the sarissa,
considerably longer than the usual Greek model, between twelve and
twenty feet, according to which source you choose. They were
trained to stand at three-foot intervals, but could close up to
receive cavalry. For mobility the Greek hoplite’s breastplate was
discarded in favor of a leather jerkin, but he kept the shield and
helmet. They were divided into regiments of 1,536 men, and Philip
gave this phalanx weight by arranging them sixteen men deep instead
of the eight or twelve of the normal hoplite formation.

One of the weaknesses of the pre-Philip block of infantry was
its flanks; to cover those of his phalanx Philip attached a corps
of his own invention, the hypaspists, later very famous as the
"Silver Shields." They were spear-and-sword men, but the spears
were shorter and the shields lighter than in the phalanx; a corps
of maneuver, which could extend or mass. For skirmishing and light
work there were archers and javelin men, still more mobile; the
latter chiefly Agrianian tribesmen from the hills, the former
mostly hired out of Crete, which had a great reputation as a
nursery of bowmen.

But the heart of the army and its striking force was the heavy
cavalry, the hetiaroi, or "King’s Companions." They had
helmet, shield, breastplate, and spear, but as stirrups were not
yet invented the spear was used for thrusting and not as a lance.
Service in the Companions was honorific, and most honorific of all
was to be a member of the squadron of 250, which always rode on the
extreme right, the post of greatest danger, and was known as the
Agema, or "King’s Own." Finally Philip had heard that among the
Greek cities of Italy they had machines that would batter down the
brick and timber walls that surrounded most cities; he imported
engineers from that area and had them set up a mobile siege train,
the first in history.

All these formations were kept with the colors until they had
very thoroughly learned their dill, making route marches of
thirty-five miles a day with full kit. By the spring of 358 the
king had 10,000 trained infantry and 600 of the Companion cavalry
and turned on the hill tribes which had been such a nuisance. The
Paeonians collapsed after one not very hard fight; the Illyrians
were strong enough to stand a battle in the formal Greek style, and
Philip showed them something new in military tactics. He held his
left refused while the hypaspists and phalanx closed on center and
right, and when a satisfactory stage of front line confusion had
been produced, charged on his left with the Companion cavalry and
nearly wiped out the enemy.

After this the hill peoples were quiet and furnished a good many
of the recruits which made up the growing body of the national
army, a process which simultaneously assisted the unification of
Macedon, since the men were not brigaded in the usual way according
to districts and races, but formed a unified force. There were some
incidents with various city states (Philip took Amphipolis by
storm, for instance, to the indignation of Athens), but nothing
really important for another six years, during which the king
matured his army and his project, which was nothing less than an
attack on the huge empire of Persia. This attack he did not intend
to make merely as King of Macedon, but as commanding general for a
league of all the Greek states. In fine, he had discerned what
Demosthenes missed, that the Greek cultural system must ultimately
be rooted out by the Persian if the former remained so divided and
the latter so extensive and wealthy. It is somewhat more than
probable that Philip intended no more than setting up a solid state
in the area populated by Greeks; that he was not looking for
conquest, but coexistence.

What Demosthenes did not miss was the implications of the early
steps in this process, the drive toward the unification of Greece.
To his mind this involved the suppression of democracy (including
the privilege of each democratic city to go to war with any other).
When, by a carefully arranged request, Philip intervened in one of
these local wars and came out of it as official head of the
confederation of Thessaly, the orator delivered his First
Phillipic. He kept on delivering them as long as he lasted.

At this point it is necessary to note that although Philip was a
diplomatic liar on a large scale, a lecher, and a drunken viking,
his civil administration was quite as sharp as his military. He
gave good government. The gold mines he had opened allowed him to
pay for everything on the nail; there was justice in his courts and
people were prosperous under his administration. What the hell was
the use of democracy when you lived better under Philip?
There was thus a strong pro-Philip party in most cities and
Demosthenes had an uphill job. It is unnecessary to trace all the
steps in the complicated double dance that followed, but in 338 the
allied armies of Athens, Thebes, and some of the lesser cities met
that of Macedon at Chaeronea. Thebes was wiped out and Athens
terribly crippled.

To the surprise of the defeated, the conqueror, instead of going
on for the expected exations and proscriptions, called a conference
of the powers of Greece at Corinth, even including Athens and
Thebes. He presided at that conference and, recognizing that Greeks
thought with their tongues, let them talk as long as they pleased.
The issue was a general agreement prohibiting wars within Greece
and naming Philip as the Captain-General of a League of Corinth to
enforce. Since such a league must have a purpose beyond the mere
police function, there was implied in its statute the idea that the
fundamental reason for the League was a war of revenge on Persia
for the aggressions begun by military means 150 years before and
continued by other devices since. This idea was of no small help to
pro-Macedonian parties; no concept could have been more popular
than a union of the homonoia against the great power which
did not recognize it.

III

In 357 Philip married, as his seventh wife, an Epirote princess
named Olympias, whom he had met at Samothrace during the
celebration of the mysteries there. She was an Orphic priestess and
a bacchanal, who claimed descent from Achilles, indulged in strange
rites and a friendship for snakes. In a sense she became his only
wife, a woman who could keep step with him. The night the marriage
was consummated she dreamed that thunderbolts fell on her womb, and
in due time was delivered of a son named Alexander.

Alexander’s earliest tutor was a man of extraordinary
strictness, who made him march half the night to gain an appetite
for breakfast and eat a light breakfast to have an appetite for
dinner. When passed beyond the grammar school age, Alexander was
turned over to Aristotle. The training was both philosophical and
military; he early developed such strength, such address, such
extraordinary good looks, such quickness of intelligence that in
view of his mother’s close connection with mysterious deities tales
began to circulate that he might be of no human origin. As he grew
up at the court he drank to keep the others company, but not very
much. He exhibited an extraordinary continence and walked out of
the room with a sneer when his father caused a courtesan to be
placed in his bed; he did not care for games. At the age of
eighteen he commanded the Companion cavalry when it delivered the
decisive charge at Chaeronea. When he was twenty, and an advanced
corps under the old marshal, Parmenio, had already secured a
beachhead at the Dardanelles for the attack on Persia, Philip was
assassinated and Alexander became King of Macedon.

The leading Greek cities of the opposition, Athens and Thebes,
expressed a delight over the death of the monster which quickly
cooled when Alexander came through the passes at the head of his
army. He was elected Captain-General of the League in his father’s
room, and turned back to northern Macedon, where, to secure his
base before attempting the great adventure against Persia, he
conducted two whirlwind campaigns to the Danube and in Illyria.
These campaigns are ill-documented, but they were key events. It
was not only that Alexander broke the tribes so thoroughly that
they gave no more trouble for a generation, but the manner in which
he did it. He marched the men harder than Philip ever had; he was
in the middle of every battle, and always with the arm with which
he intended to strike the decisive blow—once with the
phalanx, once with the Companions, once with the hypaspists, and
once even with the light-armed javelin men. That is, he had a new
concept of tactics. His maneuvers were astonishing and somewhat
outrageous to the old officers who had served with Philip for
twenty years; but they had to admit that everything came off as
planned, and there developed a bond of confidence between the
youthful commander and his army.

While Alexander was on this expedition, Darius III Codomannus,
who had become King of Persia and was by no means ignorant of what
the Macedonians intended, tried the old infallible trick of
subsidizing the Greeks to fight each other. Sparta, not a member of
the Corinthian League, took his money; so did Demosthenes for
Athens, though the city officially refused; probably Thebes
collected also. A story was spread that Alexander had been killed
in the north and witnesses were produced to prove it. Thebes rose
and attacked the Macedonian garrison in its citadel; Athens was
discussing doing something when Alexander and his army dropped out
of the clouds, stormed Thebes, killed 6,000 of its people in street
fighting, and ordered the place leveled to the ground. Athens he
treated with the greatest consideration, not only from the
emotional reason that he regarded her as the center of Greek
culture, but also for the practical one that she had a powerful
fleet. He usually had two reasons for doing things.

The Greek base was now secured. In the winter of 335, Alexander
went to the Straits, recalled Parmenio from the beachhead, and
began his own preparations for the invasion. It is quite certain
that from the beginning he had discarded his father’s concept of a
war of limited objectives for the preservation of Greece and was
aiming at nothing less than the conquest of the Persian Empire and
the whole system supporting it. He expected to be away from Greece
for a long time; in charge of Macedonian-Greek affairs he left the
other marshal, Antipater, with military authority and 9,000
Macedonian troops. Olympias, the queen mother, theoretically had
charge of civil affairs, although the authority of the two somewhat
overlapped. They hated each other, and could be counted on to
achieve some sort of dynamic balance.

The invading force consisted of 30,000 infantry and 5,000 horse.
In addition to the Macedonian regular army it included a strong
contingent of League troops, normal Greek hoplites, and a body of
cavalry from Thessaly, second in value only to the Companions. In
all previous wars the central idea had been to find the enemy field
army, beat it, and then take his cities; Alexander brought to his
task something quite as novel as Philip’s combination of
arms—a master strategic plan. For a twenty-one-year-old who
conducted his movements with a celerity indicating impatience it
was a distinctly surprising plan: to clear out the whole west coast
of Asia and, by depriving the fleets serving Persia of their bases,
to prevent any counteroffensive against his lines of communication
or home areas. Alexander was perfectly aware of the looseness of
the bonds produced by the Persian principle of local autonomy, the
fact that the provinces would change allegiance easily in the
presence of force, and the fact that it would take time for Darius
to assemble an army to deal with him.

He set out, then, down the coast of Asia Minor; and at the river
Granicus, a stream with steep banks, met the first opposition in
the form of 20,000 Asiatic horse and 20,000 Greek mercenary
infantry commanded by Memnon of Rhodes, general for Persia in those
parts. Memnon made the mistake of trying to hold the bank with his
cavalry while the Greek spearmen were in the rear. Alexander broke
the horse by a charge of the Companions, the phalanx gained the
crossing and cut the mercenaries to pieces. Not enough of the
Persians were left to keep most of Phrygia from falling under the
king’s control. Now he moved south through Asia Minor, taking
cities, with a turn back to Gordium and Angora in the central
plateau, then moved south through the mountains to the coast of
Lycia.

Darius had meanwhile gathered an army of several times the
Macedonian numbers and, well advised at least in strategy, suddenly
brought it through the passes onto Alexander’s rear in the plain of
Issue, the date being October 333. The Persians were so cramped
between hill and sea that their numbers did them no good; Darius’
army was reduced to fragments in a battle of hard Macedonian
charges, and what was left of it dissolved, while Alexander moved
on down the coast. Of the cities only Tyre held out; it took an
eight-month siege to reduce the place, but when he had it Alexander
also had command of all the Phoenician fleets and the waters of the
eastern Mediterranean.

Gaza also stood a siege, but Egypt made hardly any resistance,
and Alexander rolled through it to visit the famous oracle of
Zeus-Ammon at the oasis of Siwa. This was a key event; the priest
on duty greeted him as the son of Zeus without previous recognition
and they went in together to visit the altar of the god, where
Alexander received revelations he never afterward discussed. But
from this time onward the story of his quasi-divine origin became
more and more firmly established. There was nothing unreasonable
about this to the age; everyone, including probably Alexander
himself, believed in his descent from Achilles on his mother’s side
and from Heracles on his father’s. Also he was coming into frequent
contact with Orientals, among whom divine kingship was a rooted and
normal institution; a king was not a king at all unless he had some
special connection with the gods, even in Israel. And in Greece
royal divinity had very special uses; the antimonarchial tradition
among the city states was very strong and had been one of the main
reasons why it was possible to arouse opposition to Philip. But it
became quite a different matter if, instead of dealing with a king,
you were being ordered about by a demigod.

At Memphis, Alexander made a governmental reorganization that
was to become a pattern with him, placing the civil administration
in the hands of local talent, to rule according to traditional
usages, and the military administration and garrison commands in
the hands of Macedonian officers. It was now the spring of 331;
reinforcements from Greece, mainly mercenaries, met the army at
Memphis and Alexander turned back northward, meeting his fleet at
Tyre and sending a strong squadron back to Greece to keep an eye on
the Spartans. He struck inland through Damascus, crossed the
Euphrates at Thapsacus, and made for the upper waters of the
Tigris, which was spanned north of the ruins of Nineveh, whereupon
the Macedonians moved down the left bank of the river. Alexander’s
intelligence organization, like all his subsidiary services, was
good; he had learned that Darius was approaching with all the men
he could gather, intending to fight in the open plain east of the
Tigris; and the invader meant to oblige.

IV

Darius Codomannus does not seem to have been much of a man of
war himself, but he had a certain talent as an employer of experts,
and under their advice he had made the best possible use of the
vast potential of the empire. The whole two years of Alexander’s
campaign along the eastern Mediterranean had been spent in
assembling a vast host—Bedouins from the Red Sea, Armenians,
Parthians, Hyrcanians, even Pathans from distant India, in addition
to the home forces. The size of that army is given by several
ancient authors as a million men, which is certainly an
overestimate meaning a "very large number," but it cannot have been
smaller than the least figure given, which is 45,000 cavalry and
200,000 infantry, against the 40,000 infantry and 7,000 horse
Alexander now had.

The Persian advanced base was established at Arbela, from which
Darius moved thirty-five miles west to where an already extensive
plain was rendered still more suitably for his operations by the
leveling of hummocks and the removal of all obstacles. He had two
hundred scythe-chariots, weapons with which the Macedonians were
totally unfamiliar and which could be very formidable. These he
placed in his first line, with the idea of disorganizing the
phalanx. Midway along that line and directly in front of Darius’
own post were stationed fifteen war elephants from the Indus. It
was as certain as anything could be that Alexander would strike for
the Persian king, as he had at Issus, and that he would be leading
the Companion cavalry; the elephants were supposed to break up this
formation.

An accurate picture of the rest of Darius’ formation has come
down from the fact that his order of battle was later captured. On
the left, under the eastern satrap Bessus, one of the employed
experts, there were thrown well forward the Bactrian and Scythian
armored horse archers; next to them a big block of the Persian
royal horse guard. Out on the extreme right, under another expert,
named Mazaeus, were the Armenian and Cappadocian heavy cavalry. In
the center of the second line was a solid formation of Persian foot
spearmen, the "Kinsmen," trained like Greeks and with golden apples
on the hilts of their spears; on either flank they were supported
by formations of Greek mercenaries, the only troops who could be
expected to meet the phalanx on foot, but who would (it was hoped)
encounter it after it had been shaken by the scythe-chariots in
front and charges of the cavalry into its wings. Left of this solid
infantry center were more cavalry formations, Bactrians and
Persians; right of it, still more cavalry, Persians, Indians,
Hyrcanians, Parthians, mostly of the steppe variety. Behind,
marshaled according to their tribes, whose names do not matter,
were the various infantry levies, mostly ill-armed, mostly ill-led,
not even speaking each other’s languages, present rather to
emphasize the power and glory of the Great King than for any
serious service expected of them.

This was the array, expecting immediate attack, that Alexander
saw when he rode forward on the afternoon of September 30 with a
picked body of cavalry. Instead of attacking he went into camp to
rest his men after a day’s march, to think and to conduct certain
incantations after the manner he had been taught by the priests of
Egypt. When this private mumbling was over, Parmenio, the old
marshal, entered the royal tent to suggest that a night attack
would throw so huge a host as the Persian into disorder. Alexander
refused, with the recorded reason, "I will not steal a
victory." But as with many of his high-flown phrases this
indubitably concealed his perfectly rational appreciation that
whatever advantages Macedon had lay in discipline and timing, and
these would be lost in a night attack. A little more puzzling is
that neither high commander thought about operating against his
opponent’s communications; the logistics of Darius’ big army must
have been very difficult, and those of Alexander, so far from his
base, precarious. Probably the explanation is that both had a
supply problem that could be solved only by victorious battle.

In the morning Alexander drew out his army in an order based on
what he had seen the afternoon before, quite confident that the
Persian force was too cumbersome for any real alteration. The whole
of his right wing consisted of the Companion cavalry, with half the
Agrianians, archers, and javelin men across the front as a
protection against the elephants and scythe-chariots. Left of the
Companions were posted the hypaspists; then the phalanx in its
solid formation, finally the cavalry of Greece, Thessaly, and
Pharsalia. Old Parmenion was in charge of this wing.

The whole line was so short that although Alexander, with the
extreme right wing of the Companions, was nearly opposite Darius,
the Macedonian left did not even reach out as far as the Persian
right. There was thus a huge overlap on both wings, greatest on the
Macedonian right, and Alexander could confidently expect to be
flanked on both. Against this he provided by setting up two flying
wings, for the moment stations behind the central line of battle.
On the right, under an officer named Philotas, were the remainder
of the light troops, with a body of light cavalry under Aretes,
some Greek mercenary cavalry, and a regiment of veteran mercenary
infantry for stiffening. On the left, under Craterus, were
formations of Odryssian and Greek allied cavalry, with another
regiment of mercenaries and some Thracian infantry. Both these
flying wings were very flexible and were instructed to face as
occasion dictated, take in the flank any forces attempting the
flank of the main battle line, or wheel right around against
anything coming from the rear. In charge of the entrenched camp
were left some Thracian infantry, hillmen who often swung two
swords, not well drilled in precision movements. Alexander’s order
of battle is very important; it explains everything that
happened.

Instead of moving straight forward Alexander obliqued to his
right, the Persian left, the heavy cavalry under his own hand
moving fastest. Darius, perceiving that they were reaching the
limits of the cleared ground where the scythe-chariots would be
effective, ordered the cavalry of his left to halt this movement.
Alexander replied by putting in the Greek mercenary cavalry of
Philotas’ command; they were driven back, but as the light cavalry
of Aretes followed them, Bessus turned loose the Bactrian and
Scythian horse. There was a violent cavalry fight, involving some
of the Companions, in dust that rose so thick it was hard to see
anything. The Bactrians had better armor, and for a time the
Macedonian losses were heavy; but Alexander’s men were trained to
give hard, repeated shocks in tight squadrons while the Asiatics
fought in a confused mass. They could make nothing whatever of the
infantry support on this wind and gradually were driven back.

While this was going on, Darius launched his scythe-chariots
against the phalanx, which had been gradually carried out in front
of the Companion cavalry by its own continued rightward slant and
Alexander’s semi-retreat. The light-armed in front shot down the
charioteers, flung javelins into horses, and raced along cutting
traces and seizing bridles; the few chariots that got away from
this swarm of wasps could do nothing but run down the lanes between
the taxes of the phalanx to the rear, where they were captured by
grooms.

Now the Persian cavalry on the left of Darius’ infantry center
left its place, with or without orders, to follow Bessus’ Bactrians
and Scythians around the Macedonian right wing. Alexander ordered
Aretes with the light cavalry, recovered from its original shock,
to attack them in flank as they did so; he himself formed the
Companions into a huge wedge and, swinging out around the right
wing of the phalanx, drove them in through the huge gap left by the
Persian cavalry, straight toward the Persian infantry center, where
Darius stood conspicuous in his high chariot. Both the Companions
and the solid ranks of the phalanx took the Greek mercenaries and
the apple-bearers at the oblique, and the Persian forces crumpled.
Darius’ charioteer was killed by his side; he leaped onto a fast
horse and fled from the field.

Alexander was just driving the hypaspists into the confused mass
of tribal infantry in the rear of Darius’ center and making
preparations for a pursuit when word reached him that Parmenio and
Craterus of the left were in trouble. It was due to the Persian,
Indian, and steppe cavalry of the enemy right wing, which launched
itself at, and all around, the flying left wing of Craterus, well
behind the advancing phalanx. Parmenio had too few mounted men to
do more than barely hold head to them on his front; they lapped
around his left and through the gap that had unavoidably opened
between him and the phalanx. Many of them made for the baggage
camp; Parmenio was surrounded by the rest.

However, one taxis of the phalanx, not yet engaged in the
center, faced around, formed line with Parmenio’s infantry, and
fell on the Persians and Indians at the baggage camp from the rear.
They could not stand that and all began to drift back just as
Alexander fell on their rear with the Companions. Now came the most
desperate fighting of the day and Alexander lost sixty of his top
200 Companions before the last fighting formations of the enemy
were cut to pieces and utterly routed. Before he camped that night,
the army had made a forced march of thirty-five miles in pursuit of
the man who was now ex-King of Persia.

V

The decisiveness of Arbela lay not in the fact that it was
achieved, but in what Alexander did with it. It was merely on the
lowest plane of history that he demolished the menace to Greek
culture in the battle and in the campaigns that followed, carrying
him beyond the Oxus and to the Indus. It was merely a military
event that he had demonstrated that an an army disciplined and
armed as his could go anywhere and do anything, that the specific
defense mechanism of civilization is the cooperative and
intelligent use of means open for anyone to use.

He did much more, and it was by virtue of his background and
constitution that he did that much more. Even from Aristotle he had
learned the Greeks were very superior creatures and barbarians
hardly human. He went beyond that "and preferred to divide men into
good and bad without regard to race"1. His crowning act
was that marriage of 7,000 of his Macedonians to as many Persian
women according to Persian rites, at Babylon, following his immense
journeys and campaignings. The concept was that the
homonoia, "the unity in concord," should not apply to the
relations between Greek and Greek alone, but those between man and
man of any race. His own career hardly allowed him any other
process of thinking; the Greeks often denied him the name of Greek
and he was always conscious of some Illyrian blood; yet in the
interest of Greek culture he had overthrown the enemies of Greece
and won the empire of all the world that mattered. Zeus-Ammon was
the sun god; all were entitled to his radiance, and Alexander
conceived it his duty to bring it to all.

This concept leads straight to the Pauline "neither Greek nor
Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor
free." He spread that concept, with highly practical means of
enforcing it and bringing to its support the intelligence of Greece
and the arms of Macedon. If his own country ceased to be a great
power in the subsequent age, it was chiefly because the best brains
in it—and many of those in Greece, for that matter—were
siphoned off into the business of Hellenizing the world. Says
Ulrich Wilcken, the biographer, "The whole subsequent course of
history, the political, economic and cultural life of after times,
cannot be understood apart from the career of Alexander."

2. THE RED KING AT
BENEVENTUM

I

The ambassador from the northern tribes was a man of the most
absurd dignity, with a hook nose and a robe cut too long for him.
His Greek was so bad as to be comic, and the people in the agora
laughed as he demanded reparations for the four ships their mob had
destroyed. They all knew—their orators had told
them—that those four ships had no right in their harbor and
the mob had merely executed an unofficial act of justice according
to law. They laughed, then, and pelted the ambassador with clods.
After a while he ceased trying to reason with them, held up the
dirtied toga, made some remark in his incorrect Greek to the effect
that it would take a good deal to wash it clean, and stalked
out.

After he had left, it occured to the city fathers that those
tribesmen were very numerous and could make a good deal of trouble
for farmers in the back country. They decided to send an embassy
across the Adriatic to ask King Pyrrhus of Epirus to help them in
the name of homonoia, the union of all Greeks against all
barbarians, promising him that he could keep anything he could take
from the tribesmen. This was precisely the opportunity for which
King Pyrrhus had been waiting. He was now nearly forty and all his
life had been something of an adventurer, beginning with the time
when, as an infant, he had been carried by night and cloud to take
refuge with the Illyrians from those who had usurped his father’s
throne. Grown to young manhood, he took part as a free-lance in
that great battle of Ipsus, where it was decided that the heritage
of Alexander should not remain one, but be split into separate
kingdoms. He chose the wrong side, and was carried away a hostage
to Egypt.

There he set his cap at Berenice, one of the king’s wives, and
made such an impression on that forceful woman that she gave him
her daughter in marriage and later saw to it that Pyrrhus was
furnished with money enough to raise an army and was sent back to
his own land. This was also good politics, since King Ptolemy of
Egypt was engaged in a struggle with the dynasty that had inherited
Macedon, and anything that would weaken the old kingdom was
pleasant to him.

Pyrrhus was a collateral relative of the great Alexander, and
himself a descendant of Achilles, as proved by the red hair he
shared with the son of that Homeric hero. In Epirus he quickly
proved himself every bit the man Ptolemy had hoped. Very quickly he
raised an army on the Macedonian border and took half of Macedon,
which recognized his people as at least as much Greek as
themselves. His military skill was prodigious; like Alexander, he
was a man who enchanted all hearts, and like Philip, he gave sound
administration and honest justice. It was said of his race, the
Aecides, that they were more war-strong than wisdom-strong, but in
every respect he belied the judgment.

Not that he lacked being war-strong. In his army he had forged
an instrument at least equal to that of Philip of Macedon, and over
Philip he had the advantage of being in friendly relations with
Seleucus Nicator, to whom had fallen the Great East on the breakup
of the Alexandrian Empire, and that monarch had furnished him with
a supply of elephants, one of the most formidable weapons yet
discovered. In India they had demonstrated that they could put any
cavalry to flight, even Alexander’s.

The only trouble was that Pyrrhus, with an ambition as boundless
as that of Alexander and a perfectly attuned military instrument,
had nowhere to go. The only prospect of war was against another
Hellenistic kingdom nearly as well equipped as his own. Experience
showed that conquest in this direction would provoke a general
alliance against him; it was the custom of these states to pull
down the strongest. This was the reason why the appeal from
Tarentum, saying she was menaced by barbarian tribes, was so very
pleasant. In the barbarian West there ought to be opportunities as
wide as Alexander had found in the barbarian East; and the Red King
of Epirus responded at once.

In the spring of 280 BCE he arrived at Tarentum through a storm
so violent that it blew some of his ships all the way to Libya. The
oracle of Apollo at Delphi had promised him a victory. Cineas, his
orator, philosopher, and man of business, had gone on ahead with
3,000 men, and was ready with a report. As to the people of
Tarentum, it was not too favorable. They might as well have been
Corinthians; luxurious, indolent, and unstable, inclined toward
democratic government. In their favor it could be said that they
had brought the city of Thurii into alliance; as this place lay on
the opposite shore of the Tarentine Gulf, it afforded an excellent
base for menacing the rear of the barbarian bands, who were working
eastward along the shore.

As to the tribesmen, Cineas said they were reported quite
skilled fighters. They had formed one of those confederations which
so readily assemble and so readily dissolve among barbarians, and
had lately been engaged in war with the Samnites, a strong hill
people of the central peninsula, who would probably furnish some
auxiliaries. Pyrrhus approved the sending of ambassadors to these
Samnites and sat down to wait for the rest of the troops, only
2,000 with two elephants having come with him.

When all were arrived he had 20,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry,
2,000 archers, 500 slingers, and 20 elephants. The king immediately
closed the walks and places of public exercise and prohibited all
festivities and drinking parties as unseasonable during a war. This
did not endear him to the Tarentines, but they turned out to drill
under the eyes of his officers and furnished a contingent of
hoplites to the army, probably few more than enough to balance the
garrison he left in the citadel.

These arrangements may be conceived as taking a couple of
months. When they were complete, Pyrrhus marched out from the town
along the Tarentine Gulf with an army that, except for the
elephants, was almost a carbon copy of the one Alexander had taken
to Asia. Like the Macedonian army, that of Pyrrhus had a solid core
of phalangites, thoroughly trained, with hypaspists to link with
the cavalry in the wings. His personal bodyguard was less numerous
than the Companions, the Epirotes not being so much a horse-riding
people, but he had adopted Alexander’s practice of brevetting to
this corps d’elite the best men he could find anywhere, regardless
of origin, and it would grow. Meanwhile the bulk of his horse were
Thessalians, very good men. Cineas had arranged with some of the
other cities of Italian Greece to send allied contingents of
hoplites, but these hardly seemed necessary in dealing with a
barbarian force that was reported no greater than his own.

The Red King moved forward at once, then, and, as common
courtesy demanded, sent on ahead a herald to offer to arbitrate
between Tarentum and the tribesmen. This man presently returned
with the proud reply that they neither accepted him as an
arbitrator nor feared him as an enemy. Pyrrhus pushed on, and near
Heraclea at the river Liris camped at the top of a hill and rode
forward to examine the camp of the tribesmen on the opposite
slope.

He was looking at a Roman consular army.

II

From where he stood, the king could see the neatly palisaded
wall of the Roman camp, the guards posted all in order, the
muscular small men filing down to the river for water, with good
helmets and mail of iron bands. He turned to one of his generals
and friends. "This order of the barbarians is not at all barbarian
in character."

He did not have a chance to say much more. No sooner had the
Romans sighted his approach than they poured out of their camp and
down to the fords, covered with a foam of light-armed. This was an
impudence not to be borne, and moreover, for reasons customary and
honorific rather than tactical, it was considered at the time
desirable to fight on the far slope of a stream after having
crossed, as Alexander had done at the Granicus. Pyrrhus dispatched
Megacles to draw up and bring on the phalanx, while he himself led
the cavalry in a charge to halt this audacious advance.

Instantly he found himself in the fight of his life. The Roman
cavalry were not as numerous as he expected, but they were much
better fighters than they had any right to be, and behind them he
came up against the legionary soldiers, something utterly new in
Greek experience. They had big cylinder shields, which they locked
together from man to man against attack, short spears, and heavy
shortswords. They were formed in little blocks, the maniples, which
lined up checkerboardwise instead of in the solid Greek formations,
and these maniples displayed an amazing mobility. Attack one of
them in the flank and you were promptly flanked by another.
Pyrrhus’ horse was killed under him, his Companions were rudely
thrown back, and he barely reached the shelter of the phalanx
before the two main lines came in contact.

The shock was terrific, and as the cavalry filed into the wings,
there followed one of the hardest fights of history. The phalanx
found it had to tighten up in close order; the gaps in the Roman
checkerboard formation tended to split it apart as it advanced into
the open spaces, while the Roman soliders seeped into every
interstice, stabbing with their shortswords and using the upper
edges of their big shields under the chins of their adversaries.
The Romans could not gain against the solid ranks of the phalanx,
but neither could it do more than defend itself. Seven times the
lines separated and clashed together again. The casualties were
terrific; the Roman line, though thinner, was longer than that of
Pyrrhus, the hypaspists on the flanks were definitely outmarched,
Megacles was killed, and the phalanx itself began to shake when
Pyrrhus at last succeeded in bringing the slow-moving elephants
around from the rear against the cavalry of the Roman right
wing.

No Roman had seen or heard of these huge beasts before, and the
horses, as horses always, could not bear them. The Roman cavalry
fled and in its flight broke up the legionary formations, Pyrrhus
put in the Thessalian horse against the broken line and the battle
was won.

It was not an Alexandrian victory. The Romans had lost 7,000
killed and 2,000 prisoners, but Pyrrhus had lost 4,000 men in
killed alone, 16 percent of his total force—a whole forest
had to be cut down to burn the dead—and there could be no
pursuit. The Romans held their fords and their camp until they were
ready to go. On a precedent established by Alexander it had become
the custom among the Hellenistic monarchies to offer prisoners
service with their captor, and Pyrrhus made the usual offer. To his
surprise, it was unanimously refused; he did not get a man.

On top of the battle itself this should have given him a sense
that he was dealing with some very peculiar phenomena indeed, and
there is evidence that to a certain extent it did, but he continued
to apply the accepted formulae. In view of the fact that all the
Greek cities of south Italy now enthusiastically joined him, he had
every reason for doing so. The way to break up a confederation of
barbarians is to strike at its nexus, as Alexander had in Bactria
and again in India; the Red King marched straight on Rome.

He received another surprise; the confederation showed no signs
of dissolution. Neapolis and Capua refused him admittance, the
local people sniped his campfires with arrows from the woods at
night, and as he neared the city he found it garrisoned by another
consular army, larger than the one he had beaten. The Romans even
found resources to reinforce their retreating field force by two
additional legions.

Barbarians with such a military organization could clearly be
quite as useful allies as the Thessalians. Moreover, Pyrrhus
already had offers that would take him into fabulously rich Sicily,
where he could make gains far beyond what he might get out of these
tough hillmen. He sent Cineas to Rome with presents for the leading
ladies and political personages and an offer of peace and
friendship. He would release his prisoners; the Romans were to
pledge autonomy and liberty to the Greek cities, let the Samnites
alone in the future and, at least by implication, withdraw the
colonies they had placed at Luceria and Venusia in south Italy.
That is, there was to be an alliance and a delimitation of
boundaries, with the south and west of the Mediterranean open for
the empire of Pyrrhus.

The experience of Cineas in Rome, the first nonhostile impact of
two utterly different civilizations, has been justly celebrated.
The orator’s presents were declined with dignity, but he was heard
with respect, and voices were raised in the Senate for the
acceptance of his offer. At this moment there was led into the hall
the aged Appius Claudius, blind and very patrician, who made a
fighting speech, the first one we have of Roman record. It was his
misfortune, he said, that he was not deaf as well as blind before
he heard Romans propose such things; did they not realize that
peace with Pyrrhus after a defeat would be an invitation to other
invaders from the dynasts, world without end? Rome should
make no peace with anyone on her soil.

He convinced them; Cineas was sent back to report that the
Romans had already enlisted more new troops than they had lost in
the battle. They were not Roman citizens alone, but men from the
allies all over central Italy; this business was going to be like
fighting the Lernaean hydra, and the Romans had two new generals,
P. Sulpicius and Decius Mus, who might be good.

Pyrrhus seems not to have been too deeply impressed. After all,
Heracles had found a means of dealing with the hydra, and he
himself was conscious of something close to military genius; he had
proved it. His direct march on Rome would have been perfectly
correct if the assumptions underlying it were true. Now he adopted
a more careful strategic approach, retiring to his widespread base
in southern Italy, where he picked up important allied contingents,
then moved north along the Adriatic coast, with the anti-Roman
southern Samnites protecting his communications. Well north of
Rome, where he expected to pull in more anti-Roman groups and
establish a forward base for direct operations against the city, he
turned inland to pass the spine of the Apennines . . .

And encountered a double consular army, about 40,000 men, equal
to his own strength, even including the allies he had gathered.
There were as many pro-Romans as anti-Romans in those hills, and
the consuls had excellent intelligence. The place they chose to
stop Pyrrhus was at Asculum, on the Aufidus River, an area rough
and wooded, with marshes along the banks of the stream to hinder
the operations of Pyrrhus’ cavalry and elephants. The Romans got
across the stream to set up a parallel order battle with their
flanks on marshes, and in April 278 the contest was engaged.

Pyrrhus placed his phalanx in the center and, to avoid the
outflanking that had almost ruined him at Heraclea, prolonged its
line in both directions with hoplites from the Greek cities and
Samnites in semi-manipular formation. The two armies fought a set
piece of a battle, with neither side able to make much impression
on the other, the usual thing in ancient battles unless one side
began to break. At night they drew off by a kind of mutual
agreement. At this point it occurred to the Red King that one of
the things which made these barbarians so dangerous was the fact
that they applied what were essentially cavalry tactics to
infantry—charging in intervaled tight shock groups, which
withdrew to allow the second line of maniples to charge, then the
third. He needed to cramp them, hinder their free movement. He sent
forward the light-armed to seize and fortify the flanking marshes
for this purpose, at the same time gaining more elbowroom for his
own movements. He wanted to use the elephants, but had been unable
to find a place to put them in on the first day without opening a
fatal gap in his line.

In the morning the Romans attacked him again, and he sent
forward the elephants through the low ground, mixed with
light-armed. They had provided chariots bearing long sharp spears
as a defense against the big beasts, but the ground was too rough
for their operation; the elephants broke through. They succeeded in
driving off the Roman horse and reaching the legions, but even so,
it was a very near thing; the allies on the wings of the phalanx
were just giving way, and Pyrrhus himself was badly wounded. The
Romans lost 6,000 men, but they held their fords and their
camps.

Asculum was the Pyrrhic triumph of the famous quotation, when
the king remarked in answer to congratulations, "One more such
victory and I am undone." The 3,500 killed on his side
included most of his generals and his best friends, the flower of
the army; the Companions were practically wiped out, and he was
visibly no nearer the end of the war than before Heraclea. The
Romans began raising more legions.

III

At this point the Red King began to be conscious of a lack of
strategic support. The reinforcements that reached him from across
the Adriatic were insufficient to make good his losses, especially
in officers, and the troops he could get from the Italian cities
were showing an increasing disinclination to fight legionaries. It
was therefore with fairly sound strategic logic that he decided to
let the Roman war hang while he broadened his base by accepting the
offers from Sicily.

These offers were to place him in control of Syracuse,
Agrigentum, and Leontini if he would only drive off the
Carthaginians, who were threatening to conquer the whole island and
already had most of it. For the Carthaginians, Pyrrhus could only
have felt the contempt he began by feeling for the Romans. They
were un-Hellenized Orientals, not steady in the field. Possession
of the the main Greek cities of Sicily—and Syracuse was one
of the largest in the Hellenistic world—would give him a huge
reservoir of manpower, which needed only leadership, drill,
discipline, things the Red King could most specifically supply.
Moreover, he was sure that the Romans had been hard hit in the two
battles. It would take the time to recover, and in that time he
would gain faster than they, until he returned with all the
resources of Sicily behind him.

He went to Sicily, therefore, and justified his calculation by
driving the Carthaginians out of the island, except for the single
city of Lilybaeum, in a campaign that lasted a trifle over two
years, and whose details need form no part of this narrative. That
Sicily did not fully develop into the broad base he expected was
due mainly to his lack of the one thing Alexander so abundantly
possessed—statesmanship. Or perhaps it was the loss in the
Roman battles of his lieutenants and trained
administrators—Megacles, Leonnatus, and the rest. There was a
gap in the command structure near the top. Sicily remained in his
possession, but it was nearing the edge of mutiny when he returned
to Italy in the fall of 276. However, he had filled up his ranks,
victory in Italy would bring Sicily into line again, and by the
spring of 275 he was ready to end the Roman matter.

In the interim Rome had been systematically beating down such
tribes as the southern Samnites and Lucanians and conducting a
drive against the minor Greek cities. Pyrrhus would not have as
many barbarian allies as before, and of the towns only Tarentum and
Rhegium were strongly against Rome.

The Red King’s opponents were Manius Curius Dentatus and
Cornelius Lentulus, consuls for the year. The latter has left no
particular mark on history, but Manius Curius was something else.
To begin with, he was one of the ugliest men Rome ever saw, his
special adornment being a set of buck teeth. He had commanded
armies before and had twice been awarded official triumphs, which
were considerably more difficult to attain in those days than they
became later. When Manius Curius heard that Pyrrhus was again in
Italy, he decided that this war was no ordinary contest with Gauls
or Samnites, but the real big show. He conducted the yearly
enrollment with unexampled strictness, selling at public auction
the property of those who failed to report for duty, which shocked
contemporaries.

Each consul had an army. That under Lentulus pushed into Lucania
to hold the road up central Italy between Tarentum and Rome. Manius
Curius, who began by operating against some of the southern Samnite
tribes, crossed to the more westerly route at the news of Pyrrhus’
approach and went into camp at Beneventum. This was the chief town
and market place of the Samnites, and only while Pyrrhus was in
Sicily had it fallen into Roman hands. It gave the consul the
strategic advantage of holding a nexus, from which he could prevent
the Red King from stirring things up in Samnium while the Road to
Rome was still held. The lessons of Heraclea and Asculum were not
lost on Manius Curius; he chose an area of rough, wooded country,
where it would be difficult for cavalry and elephants to operate,
with a small stream at the rear of his camp, and out in front a
comparatively open, rolling plain, bordered on the right by forest
and on the left by timbered ravines.

Pyrrhus’ plan seems to have been to crush Manius Curius, then
swing around and take Lentulus from along his line of
communications. He detached a corps to amuse and contain the
latter, something in which it abundantly succeeded, then made a
fast march toward Beneventum with 20,000 infantry, 3,000 horse, and
always the elephants. The Roman scouting and outpost services were
excellent; Manius Curius was fully informed of the king’s approach,
but the sacrifices (doubtless not without some suggestion from the
commander) proved unfavorable, so instead of drawing out for battle
as a Roman leader normally would, he stayed in camp, shooting out
messengers to summon Lentulus.

Pyrrhus was nearly as well informed about Manius’ position as
the Roman was about him, and took the Alexandrian view that the
boldest course is usually the safest. An attack on one of those
square Roman camps, heavily stockaded and ditched, was not normally
an operation that would commend itself to a general, but the matter
would be considerably handier if he could do it by night and
surprise. He set off by a circuit through the woods in the dark,
intending to catch the Romans just before dawn.

At this point Pyrrhus’ inspiration probably let him down. It is
difficult to imagine anything unhandier for progress through a
forest in the dark than a twenty-foot sarissa; the men must have
split up into files and groups, and the movement was unexpectedly
slow. The consequence was that the torches went out, the guides
lost their way, and it was already breaking daylight when Pyrrhus’
head of column issued into a small open space at the flank of the
camp.

Within, the sacrifices instantly became favorable. The Romans
poured out like a swarm of hornets and attacked the Epirote
vanguard at the edge of the trees. This was close-in sword work
against opponents who had sacrificed the weight and cohesion that
were the specific advantages of Greek armament, and the leading
Epirote formations (it is not clear whether they were hypaspists or
phalangites) were badly broken, losing a number of prisoners and a
couple of the elephants. Pyrrhus was now too deeply involved to
disengage and he had no back road; by compulsion rather than choice
he had to draw his army through the forest on his right and accept
battle in the plain. He performed this difficult maneuver with
considerable skill, placing his elephants on the right, with most
of the cavalry echeloned behind, and hardly got his formation ready
before the lines locked.

At Heraclea, the Romans were dealing with a formation of a type
they had never met before; on the second day at Asculum they were
cramped into an area which forced them into a more or less
solid-block style of fighting, in which the phalanx was at its
best. But here they had plenty of elbowroom and the plain was not
very plane; that is, it tended to break up the Epirote close order
and offered every advantage to the attack-and-withdraw tactics of
the maniples. On the Roman right and in the center they carried
everything right away before them; Pyrrhus’ formations suffered
heavily and began to go to pieces.

But on the Roman left, Pyrrhus’ right, the elephants produced
their usual effect; neither Roman horse nor Roman foot could stand
against them. Manius Curius’ men were driven right to walls of
their camp. At this point there was revealed something that would
have been as much of a surprise to any commander of the age as it
was to Pyrrhus. Manius Curius had held out a large reserve of
legionaries within the camp; as the battle moved down on the
stockade, this reserve issued from the side gate and, all in
beautiful order, counterattacked the flank of the Epirote movement.
The cavalry were cut to pieces by the swarm of Roman javelin spears
and driven off; the infantry supports collapsed; the elephants,
attacked from flank and rear, were driven into a wooded ravine,
where two of them were killed and the remaining eight captured.
Rome was victorious all along the line.

Pyrrhus managed to hold some of his taxes together, but after he
reached Tarentum and left a small garrison under his general,
Milon, there were only 8,000 infantry and 500 cavalry left to take
back to Greece. When the Red King was killed three years later by a
pisspot thrown by an old woman from a rooftop in Argos, the
Tarentum garrison surrendered and Rome owned Italy.

IV

Beneventum decided that the future of the Mediterranean world
belonged to Rome and that the transmission medium for whatever of
Greek culture was to survive would be the Roman political system.
Or rather Heraclea, Asculum, and Beneventum together achieved this
decision. It was gained by the qualities of the Roman soldier and
the political organization that produced him. But it could have
gone the other way if Rome had not happened to find the
buck-toothed Manius Curius at just the right moment.

It would be many years before the decision was written into the
records and the long, desperate struggle with Carthage, which was
to produce a military genius of its own, lay ahead. But by the time
Hannibal arrived, Rome knew all about dealing with geniuses;
Pyrrhus had taught them. You tightened your belt, raised another
army, and ultimately found a commander who, if not a genius
himself, could hold genius in check until the supports were cut
from under it by the ceaseless pressure of the Roman system. The
essential elements of the future were present at Beneventum and the
decision was taken there.

That decision was that the Hellenistic states, even when managed
by the ablest officers, could not produce a military establishment
to overmatch the Roman, even when the latter was headed by quite
ordinary men; and when the Romans got generals who were anywhere
near as good as the troops they commanded, their superiority was
crushing. It was necessary to find that good general—there
could have been against Pyrrhus an exhausting series of Asculums if
Manius Curius had not appeared—but the point was that the
Romans always found their man.

It has been the custom to call Pyrrhus a mere adventurer and to
disparage his generalship, but on careful examination it stands up
very well indeed. At Heralcea he was certainly surprised by the
formidable character of the opposition; but all his information
about Romans came from other Greeks, and no one had ever heard of
barbarians who could face a civilized army in a pitched battle. At
least Pyrrhus realized at once what he was up against and took the
right measures. The Asculum campaign was planned to give him the
maximum security of communications and the maximum fruits of
victory. He very nearly cleared the Carthaginians out of Sicily;
and if he had won at Beneventum, he could have had Rome in
trouble.

The only thing lacking in the first two battles was pursuit; it
was by pursuit that Alexander always turned a victory into a
decision. The only thing lacking the aftermath of Pyrrhus’ Roman
victories was the surrender of the defeated side and its acceptance
into subject alliance; this was the process by which Alexander
achieved his empire. But the Romans fought so well that though
Pyrrhus could beat them he could never break them; pursuit was
impossible against an enemy still having some thousands of men in a
heavily fortified camp. And Appius Claudius supplied the answer to
the diplomatic question.

That is, the Romans had achieved a military-political system
that was incomparably stronger and more resilient than anything
Greece or the East could produce. This was obvious at the base, in
the method of recruitment, which so surprised Cineas. Philip of
Macedon’s universal training principle worked very well until it
became necessary to keep armies afoot for several years; then it
became a question of whom the recruiting agents could persuade or
catch. The Roman process of drafts by lot for a campaign kept the
ranks full as needed and left a continual reserve of trained
manpower. Whether the total system was "better" in a cultural sense
or a moral is beside the point. The question of survival, of which
system is the more valid, is not decided on moral or cultural
grounds; the place of decision is the battlefield and the decision
is taken by violence.

It is also worth noting that one of the major factors in the
Beneventum decision was political. Nothing so much surprised
Cineas, Pyrrhus, and all the Greeks as the fact that after a Roman
army had been beaten in battle and the King had marched to the
heart of the Roman territory, not a one of Rome’s subject allies
stirred to join the victor; not even the northern Samnites, who had
been subjugated so recently that Pyrrhus was still on the scene
when they gave in. In Greek experience there was nothing like this
willingness of a conquered people to stay conquered, and through
the long range of later Greek literature there has rung down to our
own day the idea that somehow Rome enslaved the intellect as well
as the body, deprived the nations of their mental as well as their
physical freedom.

This is to confound the later Rome with the Rome of Pyrrhus’ day
and of the Punic Wars. The fact is that in that earlier period the
nations were not enslaved, they were not conquered, they were not
subjugated; they were taken into the firm. Alexander the Great
showed a generosity almost incredible to ancient times in leaving
the civil administration of conquered territories in the hands of
natives, but there was a Macedonian garrison in every citadel.
Ardea, Neapolis, Fregellae, after Rome took them, were not
garrisoned by Romans; they were garrisoned by Ardeans, Neapolitans,
Fregelmans, who had a share, even if a limited one, in directing
the affairs of the Roman state of which they became a part, and who
believed they could get a better deal within it than under the
banner of any foreigner.

That this system was altered and perverted during the process of
world expansion should not be allowed to conceal the fact that it
was the system which enabled the Apostle Paul to say, "Civis
Romanus sum," and thereby force the local magistrate to
pronounce that he had no jurisdiction.

3. FIGHTING IN THE STREETS
AND THE FUTURE OF ORDER

I

The emperor and one of his subjects slanged each other like
fishwives, and everyone in Constantinople heard it, because the
debate was chanted by professional mandators across the vast
space of the Hippodrome. When it was over, the Greens left the
place in a body and the trouble had begun.

To understand what kind of trouble and what it mean, a good deal
of background in necessary. The Greens were one of the four
sectional associations (the others being Blues, Whites, and Reds)
which at base were a kind of civic national guard. In case of
attack they would have helped to man the walls. To keep them
together and active they were organized as sports associations; the
chariots in the Hippodrome races bore the colors of Greens, Blues,
Reds, or Whites, and rivalry was so intense that it ran over from
the field of sports into every other. All the colors maintained
groups of "partisans" who enjoyed dressing like Huns, with shaved
foreheads, topknots in back, and baggy sleeves in which they
carried daggers, which they had no compunction whatever about
using. At this date, which was 532 CE, the Greens and Blues had
become so important that hardly anybody spoke about the Reds or
Whites.

In addition to the partisans of the Greens and Blues there was
usually around Constantinople another source of turbulence in the
form of certain members of the private bodyguards of the great
magnates, called "Bucellarians." They were not legal, but licensed,
and they became more important as the estates grew larger near the
frontiers, where there might be trouble at any time from wild
tribesmen and bodyguards were necessary for an establishment. It
was perfectly natural that when a magnate went up to the capital
for business or fun he would take along some of his bully boys, and
it was also natural that sometimes they got into semi-organized
rows.

The forces of law and order which had to contend with these
unruly elements were represented by two classes of
guards—Domestici and Excubitors. The former were the type to
be found around any royal or imperial court in a period of general
world turmoil—soldiers of fortune of various races who had
discovered it was easier to stand to attention behind a
well-polished shield than to wander around and fight battles. The
Excubitors were something special. They owed their origin to events
of nearly a generation before the slanging match, when the Goths
were on the verge of taking over the Eastern Empire as they took
over that of the West, from the inside. There were so many of these
Goths and they were such formidable fighters that no emperor could
do without a corps of them or a Gothic commander in chief, or
magister militum, for his army. One of these officers, named
Aspar, fell into the habit of naming emperors, and he set on the
throne his steward, a Dacian named Leo. The principal reason Aspar
did not take the dignity for himself was that all Goths were
Arians, and in spite of martial prowess an Arian heretic could not
have maintained himself for a moment against a united empire which
regarded his beliefs as no better than pagan.

Besides, the arrangement of having all the real power and
practically no responsibility was thoroughly satisfactory to Aspar.
However, Leo had not been in office very long before Aspar
discovered that the arrangement was not quite as satisfactory as he
had imagined. The new emperor proceeded to raise a personal
bodyguard of extremely taught hillmen from Isauria in southern Asia
Minor—the Excubitors—and began to exhibit signs of
independent thought. The Goths knew everything about how to handle
a campaign in open country but very little about how to handle
matters in the capital; when things came to a head, it was Aspar’s
head that rolled. Ever since that date the Isaurians had been
around the palace, a sort of special Goth-prevention guardian.

This was the physical background of the trouble. In addition
there was a background of religious deviation. The Byzantines of
the fifth and sixth centuries loved to split doctrinal hairs, and
every political or personal fission produced a new heresy or
something that was called one by somebody. The most significant of
these at the moment was that of the Monophysites. Its religious
tenets are unimportant and later became so modified by further
splinterings that some of them were absolutely indistinguishable
from orthodoxy. But the central fact is that Monophysitism was
fundamentally a political movement which had taken religious form
because most intellectual differences of the age expressed
themselves in that way. Although considered a heresy, it was not so
dangerous that its adherents could not live with their Catholic
cocitizens and take the sacraments from the same priest. It was a
Syro-Egyptian nationalism, basically opposed to the growing
spiritual power of the Bishop of Rome and even to the temporal
power of the Emperor of Constantinople, unless he happened to be a
Monophysite.

Anastasius, the last emperor but one before the trouble, had so
been. So were the Greens; this also was part of the background. But
Anastasius died without leaving any direct issue, and on his death
the Byzantine Empire embarked upon its peculiar process of
election. The candidates were Anastasius’ three nephews, Probus,
Pompeius, and Hypatius, with an individual named Theocritus, who
was backed by the Grand Chamberlain. Behind the Ivory Gate, which
led from the palace to the Hippodrome, the Senate and the leading
officials of the Church conferred. In the Hippodrome itself were
gathered four groups—the Domestici, the Excubitors, and the
armed bands of the Blue and Green gangs. Candidates were being
proposed on both sides of the gate; and when a choice was named in
the Hippodrome, someone was sent to the Ivory Gate to claim the
imperial insignia for him. But no choice could attain a majority on
the Hippodrome side; Excubitors, Blues, and Domestici successively
put up men who were howled down so loudly, and to an accompaniments
of broken heads, that the gate remained closed.

Finally it was opened, and a man already dressed in the insignia
came out into the imperial box. It was Justin, commander of the
Excubitors and at least nominally one of the heads of the Blue
party. He was greeted with cheers by all but the Greens and it was
an election. That fact that he had been given money by the Grand
Chamberlain to promote Theocritus, money which had apparently
fallen into the right hands with the wrong instructions, did not
invalidate the choice.

Justin was an old solider, a Macedonian peasant of Latin
ancestry, who could not read and needed help in signing his own
name, but this does not tell the whole story. When he came to
Constantinople to make his fortune a good many years earlier, being
childless himself, he brought with him a young nephew named
Justinian, and saw to it that the boy received the education he
himself had missed. The process was not wasted; as Justinian grew
up he displayed an enormous grasp both of minute detail and the
large picture of which detail makes the parts; also remarkable
gifts of friendliness and self-control, and most especially an
incredible capacity for work. No one ever knew when he slept; at
any hour he might be writing or conferring. As some of the work
inevitably took the form of intrigue in that milieu, it is
permissible to hypothesize that he had more than a finger in the
election of the Emperor Justin.

This was in 518, and Justinian was about thirty-six years old;
he became emperor in fact while old Justin signed the official
documents with the aid of a stencil, and made the necessary public
appearances. Nine years later, when the old man was failing fast,
he associated Justinian with him in his dignities and after four
months quietly died. There was no difficulty about the
succession.

Justinian’s policy was anti-Monophysite. There was no
accompaniment of violence, as there had been so often in these
religious contests, but Monophysite monasteries were gradually
closed out and Monophysite bishops replaced. Also Justinian
effected a complete reconciliation with the Church of Rome on terms
that left no doubt of his personal orthodoxy, while the name of
Anastasius was erased from the list of emperors as that of a
heretic. But the measures were subtle and gradual; the sect was too
well rooted throughout Syria, Palestine, and Egypt for Justinian to
do anything that might provoke a civil war. Besides, his wife was a
Monophysite.

II

In 526, the year before Justinian took formal charge, the
Persians decided to go to war with the empire. Their forces were
considerably in excess of what the new Rome could bring to bear on
the eastern frontier and its line was so long and open that some
nasty raiding could be anticipated. To command in Persarmenia,
Justinian sent out two young men; one was a connection named
Sittas, the other an absolutely unknown member of his military
household, Belisarius.

This turned out to be a spectacular demonstration of perhaps the
most extraordinary of the new emperor’s qualities—his
judgment of people. Belisarius was a Thracian peasant, without a
speck of influence, little military experience, and no money to
speak of; the only thing he had was genius. It took him two
campaigns to get his feet under him; then he beat Persian forces of
double his own strength in a great battle at Daras, a battle which
he won not only by leadership, but also by inspired tactics. He
then proceeded to reorganize the army.

By this date it bore practically no resemblance to the Roman
army that fought at Beneventum. The last of the legions had been
destroyed at Adrianople 150 years before, and even if Belisarius
had wished to revive and legionary infantry, he must have realized
that there was insufficient time for training. The war was in
progress; he needed soldiers who could fight tomorrow morning and
it would take years to rear up sound infantry. Moreover, the
infantry tradition had been lost since Adrianople; the foot
soldiers of the Byzantine army were little better than camp
followers. They could be made into fairly good defensive men in a
fixed position and had capable archery, but they did not stand up
well under persistent cavalry attack and their flanks wanted
watching. The striking force of the Roman army, as of all others in
the period, lay in the cavalry, and this was of various kinds.

First, there were the Foederati, recruited partly from barbarian
tribesmen as individuals, partly from Roman citizens. They were as
near a regular force as the empire possessed (unless one counts the
Excubitors of the city guard), and while they usually gave an
excellent account of themselves in the field, there were never
enough of them and recruitment was usually done on a campaign
basis, so that the membership was constantly shifting and there was
no chance to search out and promote officer material.

Second, there were the Bucellarians, the private posses of the
great magnates and the army divisional commanders; there were not
many of them, either, and they exhibited a wide variety of
equipment and training, both of which were in the hands of the
officers who led them. Finally there were the "allies," recruited
in tribal groups from the barbarians, and under their tribal
chiefs. The best and most numerous of these at the time of
Belisarius were the Huns, very good heavy cavalry indeed, and men
whose reputation has been traduced. There was usually also a
contingent of Heruls, who had a terrific reputation as fighters,
and some Saracens for light cavalry.

There tribal contingents were nearly as numerous as the Roman
soldiers in any given army, and the leading trouble with them was
that they were temperamental. The Huns all regarded themselves as
heroes, and could never be persuaded to retreat, even to draw the
enemy into a trap. The Heruls insisted on choosing for themselves
what spot they would occupy in a battle line, and the Saracens
often decided that the amount of plunder was inadequate and went
home in the middle of a campaign.

Thus the army Belisarius inherited had no such solidly
dependable body as the phalanx, and its command structure was such
that the general in chief often had to accept the strategy and
tactics imposed by the prejudices of the "allies" instead of doing
his own thinking. Nevertheless, it was with this formless mass that
Belisarius met the homogeneous Persians at Daras and brought off a
victory in which 8,000 enemy dead were left on the field. It was
the only battle in a couple of hundred years in which there were
any tactics to speak of; and the idea that men in battle could be
maneuvered to make one do the work of two struck contemporaries as
so utterly novel that Belisarius’ reputation was made at once.
After that people listened to him.

He based his reorganization of the Roman army on the concept of
the Bucellarians, the private retainers of the great lords. Since
he was commanding general, he was entitled to more Bucellarians
than anyone else, and he proceeded to raise them into a corps of
considerable size. A little after Daras there were 1,500 of them, a
large number for the date. They were recruited from all
sources—Huns, Goths, Romans, Heruls—and they differed
from the Foederati in this: that they were given a standard
equipment of full body armor, spear, sword, a stronger bow than any
other then in use; and standard training in using the weapons. They
were long-term professional soldiers in the fullest sense of the
term and they no oath of allegiance to anyone but Belisarius. He
called them his comitatus. But it was not the
comitatus alone that made Belisarius’ army so good; it was
the fact that possessing it as a core, he could achieve the
combination of all arms that had been characteristic of Philip of
Macedon, even the degenerate infantry playing a part. The "allies"
obeyed orders when they were given by a man who had 1,500 highly
skilled fighters at his disposal.

Of course, the matter of the personal oath was a dangerous
feature and it was undoubtedly the basis of the series of strains
that later arose between the general and his imperial master,
strains which appeared only somewhat later. For the present what
the emperor wanted was victories and he got them. When the
cross-grained old King of Persia died in the fall of 531, Justinian
sent his best diplomats to Ctesiphon, recalled Belisarius and his
comitatus to Constantinople, and saw the general married off
to a lady named Antonina.

In this marriage it is possible to see Justinian’s first effort
to relieve the strain of dealing with a subject who had a more
powerful army that he did. Antonina was a close personal friend of
the empress, and could be counted on to keep Belisarius in line if
he developed uncomfortable ambitions. She was a lady of somewhat
easy virtue (which was not remarkable in the Constantinople of that
period) but she got along well with her husband and had the
qualities Justinian wanted in her.

III

But Belisarius had not been ordered to Constantinople merely to
get married and neither had an officer named Mundus, who commanded
the contingent of Heruls. Everyone knew the real reason. The two
officers were preparing for one of the most ambitious projects of
an emperor whose undertakings were all of enormous dimensions.
Justinian intended nothing else than the reconquest of the Western
Empire, beginning with the kingdom of the Vandals in North
Africa.

The plan has been described as equivalent to sending an army
from Europe around Cape Horn to conquer China and, with relation to
the available techniques and means of communication, this is
perfectly true. Moreover, it had been tried in recent years by that
same Leo who founded the Excubitors and he had been well beaten by
the Vandals, though he put an army of 100,000 and a large fleet
into the enterprise. Justinian had a poorer empire and a smaller
army. He also lacked anything like united support, especially in
Constantinople.

The opposition to the emperor’s adventure centered in the
Monophysites, and it was basically political, nationalism against
imperialism, Syria-Egypt against Constantinople, which as the
center of a wider empire would be less responsive to Alexandria. It
was also fed by a powerful opposition of self-interest to the
procedures of John the Cappadocian, Justinian’s prime minister and
financial officer, who was coming down on rich tax delinquents with
a weight not seen in a generation. For reasons that will presently
appear, it is impossible to assign any specific names of
participants in this movement, or to describe the steps by which
the dissident forces were brought into alignment. But there can be
no doubt that there was a concerted underground movement whose
objective was the overthrow of Justinian by a mass uprising, or
that the thing centered in the senators and great magnates. The
method had been tried before in Byzantine history and it had
usually succeeded.

This was the background of the slanging match in the Hippodrome
and the walkout of the Greens. This took place on Sunday, January
11, 532. That night seven of the Green-Blue partisan gangsters who
had been condemned to death for rioting were hanged. Through some
blunder two of them escaped alive, one a Green and one a Blue, and
took sanctuary in the Church of St. Lawrence. The city prefect, who
was the chief of police, threw a cordon around the church, and
Monday was a quiet day, while the men in the background made
preparations.

Tuesday the thirteenth was gala, with the finals of the races
whose opening heats had been run on Sunday, and the Hippodrome was
crowded. The temper of the gathering was evident from the
beginning; they began appealing to the imperial box for clemency
for the two men in St. Lawrence, and as Justinian refused to make
any reply, the shouting became more and more vehement. At the
twenty-second race someone started to chant, "Long live the humane
Blue-Greens!" The whole assembly reacted with such enthusiasm
that by the time the last race was run the humane Blue-Greens
poured out of the Hippodrome as a mob.

Whoever was stage-managing the affair showed excellent tactical
sense. Instead of marching to the Church of St. Lawrence, as might
have been expected, the mob made for the central police station,
the Praetorium. There they broke in the doors, released all the
prisoners, killed the officials or beat them up and drove them into
hiding, including the Prefect Eudaimon, then set fire to the place.
With the police force scattered and deprived of its command, the
mob poured down the main street, the Mese, growing in numbers and
fury. At the terminus they began smashing and burning in the great
colonnaded forum known as the Augusteum; the big main entrance to
the imperial palace was soon in flames, and so were the Senate
House behind the Augusteum and Constantine’s Church of St.
Sophia.

The fires burned most of the night. In the morning the mob began
again, at the Baths of Zeuxippus, in the angle between the
Hippodrome and the Augusteum. This structure was nicely alight when
word ran through the mob that three of the high officers of state
were in the imperial box at the Hippodrome. The crowd poured in;
there was a good deal of shouting back and forth between officers
and mobsters, in the course of which the latter presented their
demands. They were for the dismissal of John of Cappadocia, of the
Prefect Eudaimon, and Tribonian, the chief law officer.

Justinian was reported willing to comply; it made not the
slightest difference to the mob, which left the Hippodrome only to
do some more burning and to hunt out those nephews of Anastasius
who had missed the imperial election when Justin was chosen. The
crowd was disappointed to find that two of them, Hypatius and
Pompeius, were in the imperial palace with Justinian, so they went
to the home of the third brother, Probus, to tell him that he was
the new emperor. Probus had had the sense to see this would
probably happen and had left for parts unknown, so the mob burned
his house as a means of persuasion.

This was Wednesday night, and matters had now so clearly gotten
out of hand that no ordinary process would serve to dampen the
revolt. Moreover, ordinary process would have included the use of
the Domestici and the Excubitors to clear the streets, and they had
so many friends and relatives in the city that they were more
likely to join the rising than to suppress it. But Justinian did
have Mundus with his Heruls and Belisarius with his
comitatus. On the morning of Thursday, January 15, they
sallied from the burned gate into the ruins of the Augusteum, and
there they encountered something that revealed the origin and
animus of the trouble.

They found themselves fighting not a mob with its Blue-Green
foam, but thoroughly armed men, Bucellarians, retainers of the
great lords. It was merely an incident that in the course of the
fighting the clergy tried to stop it by marching between the two
parties, and were driven away, passions having now gone beyond that
kind of persuasion. There ensued a day of street fighting of the
hardest character, work for which Belisarius’ men were not
particularly well equipped, but with the help of the Heruls, he
cleared most of the burned area. He undoubtedly placed strong guard
posts around this conquered area and on Friday morning he began
again, north of the St. Sophia area. The revolutionists countered
by setting fire to the city well to the north, the wind carried the
flames through buildings into the faces of Belisarius’ men and they
destroyed a considerable area, including the Hospital of St. Samson
with all its patients.

The base of the revolters appeared to be in the north part of
the city, around the Brassmarket. On Saturday the seventeenth
Belisarius tried to get at it up a group of streets to the east of
his previous line of advance. The insurgents barricaded themselves
in a big building called the Octagon and could not be ejected until
the soldiers set it ablaze, a fire which spread along most of the
main street and cleaned out a good many important buildings.

That night two things happened. Belisarius reported that he was
making little progress at anything but burning down Constantinople,
and in view of the growing shortage of food and water in the palace
area, Justinian sent away everyone who did not have active business
there, including a number of senators and the Anastasian nephews,
Hypatius and Pompeius. They protested their loyalty and it is just
barely possible that the protests were sincere, though Hypatius had
been pretty deeply involved in an earlier conspiracy.

But they were packed off, and when the mob found were available
on Sunday morning the eighteenth, it knew what it wanted. Hypatius
was carried in triumph through the smoking streets to the Forum of
Constantine and crowned with a gold chain, the only object at hand.
This proceeding completely ruined Justinian’s final effort to quell
the revolt with words where more violent methods had failed. He
entered the imperial box at the Hippodrome, carrying a copy of the
Gospels, and swore to make a faithful peace, with a complete
amnesty. He was greeted with shouts of "Perjurer!" and after he had
returned to the palace, Hypatius was brought into the box and
cheered by the exultant throng. There presently arrived before him
a man from the palace named Ephraim, who reported that Justinian
and his whole court had fled to Asia and the revolution was a
success. A good many of the senators rallied around the box after a
private meeting, at which they decided to attack the palace as soon
as the celebration for Hypatius was over.

IV

Ephraim was a trifle premature. His informant had left an
imperial council just after John the Cappadocian urged flight by
sea to Heraclea, and Belisarius agreed with him, in view of the
hopelessness of the military situation. The informant had failed to
hear the next speaker, who was the Empress Theodora.

About this woman the contemporary historians are very positive.
They say she was a prostitute, and she certainly was; she was
brought up in that profession. They also agree that she was a
comedienne of quite extraordinary gifts, that she was pretty,
petite, and vivacious. It takes a little closer reading of the
scandalmongers to discover why she was perhaps the most
extraordinary example of Justinian’s special talent for selecting
the right person.

When he first formed an attachment with her, she had given up
both the stage and whoring and was a business woman in a small way,
with a loom of her own. Doubtless her unquestionable physical
charms had something to do with the connection, but they were not
the operative factor; Justinian was surrounded by beautiful women,
only too willing to be charming to an emperor. It was a union of
intelligence, character, and spirit, and it became something more
than a marriage.

Justinian gave her one of the largest personal settlements ever
received by a woman in an age and place where women commonly turned
everything they owned over to their husbands. She managed the
property with a skill that excited the admiration of even John of
Cappadocia. She could argue theology with a bishop and foreign
affairs with a diplomat, and she did both. She took part in every
important measure of the government. It was usually in ways not
directly traceable because the team of Justinian and Theodora
functioned so completely as a unit, with separate but overlapping
spheres of authority; but she certainly had a finger in her
husband’s delicate handling of the Monophysite question.

This was the woman who addressed the palace conference after
Ephraim’s informant had left. She said, "In a crisis like the
present we have not time to argue whether to woman’s place is the
home, and whether she ought to be meek and modest in the presence
of the lords of creation. We have got to get a move on quick. My
opinion is that this is not the time for flight—not even if
it is the easiest course. Everyone who has been born has to die;
but it does not follow that everyone who has been made an emperor
has to get off his throne. May the day never come when I do!
If you want to make yourself safe, Emperor, nothing stops you.
There is the sea over there, and boats on it and money to pay your
way. But if you go, you may presently very much wish that you had
not. As for me, I stand by the old saying, that the best winding
sheet is a purple one."2

The speech was decisive, and under the influence of his wife’s
courage Justinian’s courage reblossomed. He sent the eunuch Narses
(who was later to be another of his impossible and monstrously
successful choices for military command) with plenty of money to
dig out the leaders of the Blues and appeal to them to call off
this nonsense on grounds of party loyalty. They now had an emperor
of their own faction; were they going to exert themselves further
to put a Green in his place? Narses’ money was pretty
convincing and his words probably quite as much. The rioting had
gone on long enough to take most of the fun out of it, and it is
probable that the Blue leaders succeeded in getting a good many of
their people out of the Hippodrome before the next act.

This was a sufficiently appalling one. At the same time Narses
started, Justinian send Belisarius at the head of the
comitatus to the imperial box to arrest the new emperor. He
could not get in through the passages, and the prospect of fighting
a way through heavy doors and guard rooms against Domestici and
Excubitors who now considered Hypatius the legal emperor had little
appeal. Belisarius therefore went around through the ruined area of
the Augusteum and the Baths of Zeuxippus, picking up his guard
details as he went, to the colonnaded arcade known as the Portico
of the Blues, the main entrance to the Hippodrome. Mundus and his
Heruls attacked and broke open a secondary gate, usually
barred.

Before them the two groups of steel-clad fighting men had not
only the authors of the revolt, but the revolters themselves,
caught en masse in a position where they could no longer escape
under the cover of burning hospitals. They proceeded methodically
to slaughter every one of them. At the very least estimate 30,000
were killed, not all in the massacre, since the street fighting of
the previous days had been pretty serious. Hypatius, a rather poor
stick of a man, was pulled from his box, and had to be executed
with his brother Pompeius to remove any focus for future uprisings,
but that was the end of Justinian’s vengeance. He banished eighteen
men who had escaped the scene in the Hippodrome, but a few months
later quietly canceled even these sentences. He could afford to be
generous, for his victory was so complete that no other was
necessary.

V

It was called the "Nike sedition," but in reality it was a
military operation, with a staff, a plan of campaign, and an
organized body of troops, the humane Blue-Greens being irregular
auxiliaries and the fires a surprise weapon. If Theodora had not
talked the council out of their discouragements, if the
Justinian-Theodora-Belisarius team had not acted with lightning
efficiency after she did, there would have been a siege as well as
a campaign. We do not know who planned the operation, because
whoever it was died in the Hippodrome, but it is clear that the
planning was good and the campaign came perilously near to
success.

Perilously: for the issues involved were far beyond the question
of whether the empire should be Monophysite or Catholic,
nationalist or imperialist. This issue had its importance, to be
sure, and though nothing could have solidified the churches of Rome
and Constantinople, they were brought far closer together than if
the East had gone fully Monophysite. But it was peculiarly
important that the emperor should remain Justinian, the man of wide
vision and immense projects. The Nike sedition was directed against
only one of these projects, the African invasion, but in a sense it
included them all; it was a revolt in favor of provincialism, the
narrow view, and fragmentation.

Justinian’s conquests in Africa and Italy did not succeed in
reuniting the empire, and his military adventures in the West have
usually been treated as unproductive acts of aggression. But it is
worth looking at what they did accomplish. They destroyed the
Vandal kingdom in Africa and fatally crippled the Gothic kingdom in
Italy. Sentimental regrets over the downfall of these noble
barbarians cannot alter the fact that they were Arians, peculiarly
determined to see the triumph of their own sect. Whether they used
persecution, like Huneric in Africa, or, like Theodoric in Italy,
toleration combined with a firm determination to make all major
decisions for a church of which he was not a member, the result was
the same. The Arian Church was gaining, it was the official church
of the court and upper classes; and it was not a universal church,
it had no focus. In a religious sense it was what the Monophysites
were in a political: the thing whose greatest effort was turned
back by the Justinian-Belisarius-Theodora team in the Nike
sedition.

This is not all. It was perhaps not of vital importance that one
of Justinian’s large projects was the construction of that new
Church of St. Sophia, which even yet remains one of the wonders of
the world. But it was of the utmost importance that one of the
officers whose dismissal was demanded by the mob was Tribonian, and
that a dismissal would have been a warrant of execution. For
Tribonian was in charge of the most monumental of all Justinian’s
projects and the most permanent—the codification of Roman
civil law.

The first section, the "Codes," or index of what was to come,
had just been published at the date of the Nike sedition and work
was just beginning on the more complete classification. It was
beginning primarily because Justinian had examined the Codes,
decided they were nowhere near good enough or complete enough, and
sent Tribonian and his law committee back to start all over.
(Nothing was ever good enough or complete enough for Justinian; his
projects were always beyond the human, and partly because they
were, what was left of them lasted perdurably.) Some idea of
the size of the work done by Tribonian’s committee can be gained
from the fact that the law had to be extracted from more than 2,000
treatises, comprising 3 million sentences; reconciled, arranged,
fused. That law had fallen into inextricable confusion, and it was
challenged in various ways by barbarian custom. But after Justinian
had sent Tribonian through it, it stood; and the whole of Western
civilization was different and better and more just. This was the
world that hung in the balance during the Nike sedition.

4. KADISIYAH AND THE
COST OF CONQUEST

I

The trouble with the second Persian Empire was that it was not
an empire. Its rulers bore the Achaemenid title of "king of kings,"
but the kings to whom the titular ruler acted as chairman of
committee were so numerous and had so much individual authority
that the head of state hardly dared to promote for ability unless
it appeared in one of the lordly houses. There were not only the
great feudatories known as "lords of the marches," but also the
lesser "lords of the villages" and "knights," who had authority
over part of a city or the whole of a smaller town. And in addition
there were the Magi, or Mazdean priests, who could always bring a
man up for heresy, and any kind of incorrect conduct might turn out
to be heretical.

The system was completely interlocked, ironbound; there was no
possibility that a change would be made in it at any point. And
while the tradition that stood for a constitution required that the
king of kings should be a member of the royal house, it was not
specific about which member, so that there was usually a war of
succession at the end of each reign, and sometimes one in between.
On the whole, it is rather surprising that the general political
talent which seems endemic in the Indo-European race should have
been able to overcome such handicaps and produce an administration
that was reasonably orderly and a system of taxation that was
reasonably fair.

It also produced a military organization that was one of the
most effective of the early Middle Ages. The nobility down to and
including the knights was a nobility of service, specifically
military service. The Achaemenid tradition that a noble need only
know how to ride, shoot, and speak the truth had been thoroughly
revived, like so many traditions of the pre-Alexander empire, and
even improved upon. The nobles knew nothing but war, though not in
a way to be confounded with the feudalism that sprang up later in
the West. The military caste of the Sassanid empire were not
domiciled in isolated castles, and their allegiance was not
transmitted by stages through a series of terraced lordships, but
went directly to the king of kings.

Professionally also they differed from the Western knights and
from any predecessors. They were all cavalry, of course; the
decline of the infantry already pronounced at the time of Justinian
and Belisarius had reached its nadir, and the only footmen who
accompanied a Sassanid army were troops of the baggage train, armed
with a small spear and a wicker shield covered with hide. The
horsemen were a development of the comitatus of Justinian’s
time. They had scale armor, steel caps, and light shields, and
carried almost every conceivable kind of weapon—a six-foot
spear, a bow, a short straight sword, a mace, a hand ax, and two
ropes, which together made a kind of lasso and was used for pulling
an opponent off his horse. In view of the amount of training
necessary to obtain dexterity with all these weapons, it is not
surprising that they had to make a profession of war. At moving in
close-knit formations for heavy shock to the sound of the trumpet
they were good; they employed many barbarian auxiliaries of the
usual desert light cavalry type and had picked up a considerable
amount of siegecraft from the Byzantines. Their armies usually
employed armored elephants, but only as a reserve. The Westerners
had worked out a battlefield technique for dealing with these
animals, and refused to be borne down or panicked.

Two institutions of the Persian army were unique and of some
importance in the psychological warfare department. It always
carried a huge throne, which was set up in the center of the battle
line and occupied during action by the shah or the general acting
for him. It was surrounded by the picked bodyguard, called "the
Immortals," as they had been in the days of the old empire, nearly
a thousand years before, with an outer circle of foot archers.
Before it there was always borne the other institution, the
Diraish-i-kaviyani, theoretically the leather apron of the
heroic smith who had founded the empire back in legendary times by
leading a revolt against the ruling Semites. It had become a banner
of fifteen feet by twenty-two, and was all one crust of precious
stones, since it was regarded as holy and each successive king
added new decorations to it with the help and approval of the
Mazdean priests. When a Persian army was defeated, the first care
was always the preservation of the sacred standard; men gave their
lives for.

The greatest weakness of this army was the lack of control by
the high command during the frequent struggles for succession. But
as no one could remain king of kings very long without making
himself thoroughly feared, this was not usually a difficulty. About
the turn of the sixth into the seventh century, Chosroes, second of
the name, got his war of succession under control and began to
think about other things. In a state organized like Sassanid Persia
there was only one line intellection could follow; the strong,
rigid system permitted no major activity but war. An able
grandfather had pushed Chosroes’ eastern frontier up to the Oxus
and the Himalayas, and there was not much point in proceeding
farther in that direction. The only thing the new king of kings
could do was take up the war against the Byzantine Empire that had
been running off and on for nearly a hundred years, or ever since
his great-grandfather attacked Justinian.

The usual thematic material of this war was a series of battles
and sieges in Mesopotamia and Armenia, with Persian raids into
Syria and Byzantine counterraids into Persian Iraq. Just at this
juncture the Byzantine Empire was experiencing some dynastic
troubles of its own, the Balkan provinces were pulverized by a huge
incursion of Slavic Avars, and the Persians were lucky enough to
turn up a couple of highly competent generals besides Chosroes
himself. He introduced a variation into the pattern, so effective
that it gained him the name of Chosroes Parvez, "Chosroes the
Conqueror," and he deserved it. Armenia was so thoroughly subdued
that its church split from that of Constantinople; Cilicia and
Cappadocia were subdued. Jerusalem was taken in 614, with 57,000
killed and 35,000 more carried away as prisoners. Damascus, Tarsus,
Antioch were occupied. Alexandria was captured and all northern
Egypt passed into Persian hands. Persian armies cruised at will
through Asia Minor and an attempt was made on Constantinople
itself.

All this was the work of some years, but by 619 it would have
struck a contemporary new chronicler that the Byzantine Empire was
done for. The loss of Egypt had cut off the usual grain supply and
there were famine and pestilence in the capital. There was no money
and no taxes were coming in. Even outside the cities, where the
Persians were only too glad to see the Greeks quarreling among
themselves, administration had collapsed to the edge of anarchy.
The armies had been beaten and broken up in the field. And with
Illyria in the hands of the Avars, Armenia, Anatolia, and the
mountain districts of southern Asia Minor in those of the Persians,
the recruiting grounds where new forces could be raised were no
longer available.

However, there remained intact the African province Belisarius
had conquered for Justinian after the suppression of the Nike
sedition, the conquest which the sedition was started to prevent.
The Emperor Heraclius himself was from that province, and to it he
turned for men. Its very existence had made it necessary for the
empire to keep up a navy; what was left of Byzantium held the sea
and the communications it offered. For money Heraclius appealed to
the Church, and in view of the fact that the Magians had conducted
some fairly intolerant persecutions and encouraged the Jews to join
them in massacring the Christians at Jerusalem, the cash was
willingly given. The various generals had all proved failures or
tried to seize the decaying empire for themselves. In spite of the
fact that it was warned that only ruin could come of it, Heraclius
held a solemn communion, then called a great meeting of Senate,
officials, and people in the Hippodrome, placed the empire in the
charge of the Patriarch Sergius, and took the field in person.

The date was April 5, 622; five months later an Arab who had
been making a nuisance of himself by preaching that he was a
prophet in the important desert commercial center of Mecca was
forced to leave town.

II

The surviving records about Heraclius and his campaigns are not
very satisfactory, nor are the details important, but it is clear
that in the tactical field he recovered part of the lost art of
infantry, and in strategy he was something like a master. He
maneuvered the Persians out of Asia Minor, beat them in a battle in
which the enemy army was almost destroyed and, instead of trying to
recover the lost places in the south, drove northeast into the
country at the foot of the Caucasus. During the next six years the
destruction in the West was repaid with doubly compound interest.
Every time the Persians sent army against Heraclius he broke it,
usually with heavy loss, and every time he came to a city he sacked
it. He reached the Caspian and swung southward; he inflicted a
deadly blow to Persian morale by taking and destroying the greatest
fire temple in the country; and his ambassadors succeeded in
calling in the Khazar tribes of the steppes to do some more damage.
In 628 it became evident to the Persians that Chosroes the
Conquerer was losing his grip. One of his sons had him thrown into
the "Well of Darkness" and then murdered.

The son got a peace out of Heraclius but he did not get much
else; that year the Tigris and Euphrates produced a flood of Noahan
proportions and the new king of kings died in the ensuing
pestilence. His only son was an infant, and as might be expected,
there was a chain reaction of wars of succession, in which the
various candidates were backed by groups of magnates. It is
probable that losses in defeats by Heraclius had weakened the
lords, both intellectually and physically. During four years no
less than twelve persons, two of them women, wore the mountainous
royal tiara, and none of them kept it more than a year, or could
get recognition from enough of the country to bring the rest into
line. At last the supply of eligible princes began to run low, even
for a royal house so prolific as the Persian; in 632 it was
generally agreed that a child named Yezdigerd II was the real
article. A general named Rustam became what we would call
regent.

During the next year there was a raid of Arabs against Hira on
the border of Iraq; the town was ransomed for the absurdly small
sum of 60,000 dirhams, and Rustam followed by a raid into Arab
territory to remind the tribes that they must not do this sort of
thing.

III

Historians of an exclamatory temperament often voice surprise
over "the explosion of the Saracens." This is because they have
been taken in by Muslim chroniclers, who refer to the period before
Muhammad as "the time of ignorance," with the implication that the
Prophet was a civilizer as well as a religious leader. It also
completely overlooks the nature of the material that exploded.
Actually, there was throughout the Arabian peninsula at the time
something which, if not meeting all the demands of a civilization,
was considerably above barbarism. There were tribes grouped in
clans, yes, and feuds among them; a good part of the population
were nomads. But the arts flourished, especially poetry (which may
be considered a barbaric art), commerce was reasonably secure
(Mecca owed its importance to the fact that it was a trading town
which had become sacred to business, so no violence was allowed in
the area), and the position of women was higher than in most of
contemporary Western Europe, a very good index. There was no little
agriculture, partly based on peaches and pomegranates, which did
not ship well, but partly also on dates and aromatics, which did
ship and were in wide demand.

At the time of Muhammad this nascent civilization was suffering
from a malaise. There were two basic causes. One was a persistent
overproduction of children in spite of the common practice of
female infanticide. The consequence was emigration by seepage; Arab
stocks had heavily infiltrated the whole of Syria, Palestine, and
even Egypt, where they readily mingled with kindred stems that had
no basic differences even in language. By the sixth century these
emigrant Arabs even had two kingdoms of their own, Ghassan at the
northwestern edge of the desert and Hira on the northeast. Ghassan
was subdued and broken up into districts by the Byzantines while
Hira became a Persian dukedom. But the key fact was that throughout
most of Syria, Iraq, and Mesopotamia the bulk of the population was
strongly Arabic, with blood and clan connections back in the
homeland.

The second difficulty was economic: both on the Red Sea and the
Persian Gulf shipping had become efficient as a common carrier. As
water transport is always easier and cheaper than that by land, the
old caravan routes that had provided a way of life for so many
Arabs fell into decline. That is, there was unemployment in the
overpopulated peninsula, and almost anything would have touched off
some kind of explosion.

That the energies of the explosion were directed outward and not
inward was due to several causes. One was the nature of the
Prophet’s teaching, which contained several features unique to an
area where prophets were not uncommon. It made positive virtues out
of several things that were necessities of life in the
desert—abstemiousness, the avoidance of luxury, the laws of
hospitality. This made it very easy to be a Muslim. It forbade the
infanticide which is contrary to every human instinct and offered a
viable substitute in polygamy. It turned fighting and plunder into
profoundly religious acts, provided they were directed against
unbelievers; and it provided a common ground on which every Arab
could meet every other Arab, without distinction of tribe or clan.
The appeal of Islam on a purely spiritual basis is not to be
neglected; but it is worth noting that if the faith had been put
forward in the most cold-blooded rationalism as a solution to the
problems of place and date, it could hardly have been better
conceived.

In the second place, Muhammad had the good fortune to number
among his earliest converts an extremely able administrator, Omar,
and a general far beyond the ordinary, Khalid ibn al-Walid. The
Prophet himself was certainly an administrator of the highest
skill, but as a military commander he was energetic rather than
able. The special merit of Khalid as an officer was that he managed
to convert a tactical doctrine into a strategic system. The
Saracens were naturally light cavalry, bow- and spearmen, and in
view of the shortage of natural materials their bows cannot have
been much better than those of the Persians, which were not as good
as the Byzantine bow. The tactics of this kind of light horse are
dictated by their equipment: they are skirmishers. What Khalid did
was skirmish the enemy to death. In the period following the death
of the Prophet, when many of the desert converts seceded and half a
dozen new prophets claiming divine inspiration appeared, Khalid did
fight some semi-formal battles which were decided by his own
furious energy; but later, when he came up against the Byzantines,
a typical "battle" lasted for days, and in one case weeks.

The problem faced by all commanders down to the equalization
imposed by firearms was that of using a military tool developed in
and intended for one kind of country in a region of quite different
physiographical characteristics. The irresistible horsemen of the
Tartars were quite helpless when they tried to attack the Japanese
by sea, and they had to turn back from an utterly inferior military
establishment in the jungles of Burma. The armored knights who
ruled Western Europe had terrible trouble when they met pikemen in
the Swiss valleys. Khalid turned the skirmishing tactic into
something that could be used anywhere. He brought his army into the
presence of the enemy and waited. Not passively, for he attacked
everything and anything that moved outside a tight array. But all
the same he waited until the battle became one made up exclusively
of small skirmishes, his kind of battle. Superior mobility and
superior logistics helped him greatly; his men could maneuver
around any formation, they needed nothing but a bag of dates and
access to water, while his opponents had to have provision
convoys.

With this technique he conquered the whole of Syria and
Palestine within four years after the death of the Prophet. He was
considerably aided by racial and religious forces. The Arabs of
Ghassan and, above all, those of southern Palestine, who might have
formed a buffer state, had become Christians. But just at the
juncture of Khalid’s appearance the Emperor Heraclius had been
forced to discontinue the customary subsidies to the Palestinian
Arabs because, the Persian danger being exorcised, the Church
wanted its money back from him in a hurry. Moreover, throughout
Syria and Egypt, Christianity retained a strong Monophysite strain.
Heraclius and his patriarch sought a compromise formula, the
Monothelite, but the men they placed in charge of propagating it
turned out to be persecutors instead of persuaders, and the whole
area was unhappy over something that meant a great deal to it.

When Khalid and his Arabs appeared, they were welcomed as
deliverers by people of their own race, many of whom wished and
were allowed to accept the new faith. Christians of non-Semitic
stock and Jews found they were allowed to practice their religion
in any form they chose, provided they paid a head tax far less than
what Constantinople demanded in other forms of contribution. The
Bishop of Damascus helped arrange his city’s surrender and only the
thoroughly Greek cities of Jerusalem and Caesarea held out for any
time in hope of relief.

The relief never came. Heraclius was now too old to take the
field himself, and after two of the armies he had entrusted to
generals who could make nothing of Khalid’s tactic were wiped out,
he was unable to raise a third. Everything from Antioch and Edessa
southward became permanently Muslim. The Prophet’s old friend Omar,
now caliph, or "successor," Commander of the Faithful, began
preparations for the invasion of Egypt. Conditions there were much
the same as in Syria.

IV

Hira, like Ghassan, was a state of Arab blood, ruled by
non-Arabs. The marshes of the lower Euphrates separated it from an
area occupied by a nomadic clan called the Bakr. The head of this
clan, one Muthanna, waited on Khalid during his march to Syria, and
although the Bakr had not accepted Islam and had no current
intention of doing so, suggested a joint raid on Hira as a highly
profitable enterprise. Khalid agreed; this was the 60,000 dirham
raid of 633, which provoked Rustam to countermeasures. The
preparations for these measures were no secret, and as Muthanna did
not like the prospect of dealing with a major Persian army unaided,
he appealed to Omar at Medina for help. He may also have thrown out
some hint about joining the new religion.

It is necessary to note that at this stage Islam, in spite of
the Prophet’s statements of universality, was a racial movement.
The policy of Medina was to take in only pagan, Christian, and
Jewish Arabs (of the last there were a great many), leaving
non-Arabs as payers of the head tax. In Syria no effort was made to
push beyond the ethnic limit. Muthanna was within that limit and
thus entitled to help, regardless of his religion. But at the date
of his appeal the Syrian campaign was at its height, Khalid was
facing the first of the major Byzantine armies with the issue
undecided, and Omar was mobilizing every possible resource in
support. The caliph was not interested in fighting Persia. Unlike
the sprawling empire, it was a well-knit unit of non-Arabic people,
which already claimed some vague suzerainty over the peninsula, and
there was not much sense in stirring up such a sleeping lion. The
help sent to Muthanna was therefore a small, purely defensive
force.

It was not well led, and in the Battle of the Bridge, November
26, 634, it was crushingly defeated, mainly as a result of a charge
of elephants which the Arab horses refused to face. Muthanna had
difficulty in pulling a third of his force out of the wreck, and
Abu Obayd, the captain from Medina, was taken and trampled to death
by a huge white elephant.

At this date Rustam was only about as much interested in Arabia
as Omar was in him; he still had some internal difficulties to
settle and undertook nothing beyond a minor raid for the next year
and a half. But by the fall of 636 the whole strategic situation
had changed: the last of the great Byzantine armies had been wiped
out in Syria; Damascus and Antioch were in the hands of the
Saracens, Jerusalem and Caesarea were under siege. Rustam assembled
an army to put an end to this menace.

As usual, the news crossed the frontier before the troops did,
and Omar set about gathering a force to defend not merely fellow
Arabs this time, but also the line of communications to the new
possessions in Syria. Command was given to an old companion of the
Prophet, Sa’ad ibn Abu Wakkas, a man afflicted with boils. Shortly
after his arrival in the area Muthanna died and, in accordance with
Arab custom, Sa’ad secured the allegiance of the Bakr by marrying
his widow. Making up the army was not so easy; word had run through
the peninsula that the fertile fields of Syria were something like
paradise, and the first great wave of immigration was washing into
the corridors. It was doubtless a high religious duty to
smite the infidel in the name of the Prophet, but a man had to look
out for his family; that also was in the Qu’ran. Sa’ad probably had
not collected above 6,000 men (in spite of enormous figures given
in the chronicles) when Rustam crossed the Euphrates and encamped
just north of the marshes on the border of the cultivated zone, at
Kadisiyah. It was May or June 637.

The Arab tale is that the Muslims sent fourteen ambassadors who
reached King Yezdigerd himself with a demand that the Persians
either adopt their religion or pay a head tax. The people of
Ctesiphon jeered at the tattered homely garments of the emissaries.
Yezdigerd told them that if they were not ambassadors he would have
had them beheaded, and spoke feelingly about Arab customs.

The head of the embassy said, "The prince speaks truly. Whatever
you have said regarding the former condition of the Arabs is true.
Their food was green lizards; they buried their infant daughters
alive. But God in His Mercy has sent us a holy Prophet, a holy
volume which teaches us the true faith. Now the Arabs have sent us
to ask you either to adopt our religion or fight with us."

The Persians gave them one sack of dirt per man to carry away;
they laid the burdens before Sa’ad as an omen: "for earth is the
key to empire."

Rustam had considerably more men than the Arabs, and Sa’ad
appears to have been unwilling to fight until the arrival of some
reinforcements promised from Syria. But the Saracens began to run
short of provisions, and when they sent out a foraging corps to
collect some fish from the river, the Persians attacked and Sa’ad
felt compelled to draw up in battle formation. The ball was opened
by a number of Persian knights riding out of the ranks, shouting
"Man to man!" as their custom was, challenging the Muslims to
single combat. As it suited the Khalid tactical system to fight
this way, they got plenty of customers, but the result of these
personal encounters was usually in favor of the better-armed
Persians. But as skirmishing went on all along the line Rustam
perceived he was not going to get the close general action he
wanted and, with the memory of the Battle of the Bridge in mind,
ordered up the elephants. Once again the Arab horses would not
stand; in fighting that lasted till evening Sa’ad’s forces were
driven back, much scattered, and saved from destruction only by
some foot archers who slowed down the elephants.

An army not inspired by Muslim fanaticism might have broken up
then and there, but Sa’ad managed to pull his men together during
the night, doubtless not without assuring them that help was on the
way from Syria. It began to come toward morning; the Arabs again
took the field in their loose formations, and all day long there
was one of the typical skirmishing battles of the Khalid system.
Light cavalry had rather the better of it that day over heavy; the
Persian losses are stated at five to one of the Muslims, but
neither army showed any real sign of breaking when night shut down
on the second day.

There was anxiety in both camps that night. Sa’ad was so
troubled by his boils that he had barely been able to stay on his
horse during the day, and in an Arab army, where personal
leadership means everything, was unable to provide that
indispensable quality. The main body of the Syrians had not arrived
and until they did the enemy would be in superior force. There was
a grave conference; Sa’ad turned over his field command for the
following day to Kakaa ibn Amru, the captain of the
Syrians—and one must picture messengers going from campsite
to campsite through the dark informing everybody of the change.

In the Persian camp Rustam was still hopeful of victory, but
considerably disturbed by his inability to fix on any solid
tactical plan in this formless desert fighting. The enemy had no
real camp to attack or communications to cut. He received some
reinforcements during the night, and doubtless as a result of his
report on the first day’s fighting, it included additional
elephants. In the morning they were to be the main reliance in
dealing with the sinuous Saracen formations; they were placed in
front and center when the Persians drew out toward where the
Muslims were advancing in clouds of dust.

But the Persians were not now dealing exclusively with desert
Arabs who had never seen an elephant; they now had on their hands
the Syrian troops, many of who had previously served the Byzantine
Empire and knew all about elephant fighting. They galled the big
animals frightfully with bowshot and javelin and even had the nerve
to attack them on foot with spear and sword, jabbing at eyes and
cutting off trunks. The elephant was always a two-edged weapon; now
these stampeded through the Persian ranks, doing frightful damage,
and into the gaps they made, Kakaa poured in his formations.

The Persians did not give up easily. Rustam left his official
throne to mount a horse and personally rally his lines. They were
driven back to a wide canal, where the battle hung for a time, but
it did not end even with darkness, since the Arabs, now confident
of victory, kept pressing on in small groups, at one point or
another. It was called the "Night of Clangor" or "Night of
Delirium," "because each one caught the other’s beard," and it must
have been a wild scene in almost complete darkness, but in this
confused close combat most of the Persian advantages were canceled
and the gains were all on the side of the Saracens.

With daybreak came a sandstorm, and it blew in the faces of the
Persians. Rustam took refuge from it among the baggage camels; a
sack of money fell from one of them, injuring his back, and he
plunged into the canal to swim to safety. At that moment there
appeared an Arab named Hillal ibn Alkama. He hauled the Persian
generalissimo from the canal by one foot and cut off his head, then
ran to the official throne, by this time in Muslim hands, and
mounted it, shouting, "By the Lord, I have slain Rustam!"

It was the final blow; what was left of the Persian army
panicked. But there was no place left for them to go; hundreds in
their heavy armor were drowned in the canal and thousands were cut
down along its banks in utterly open country by Arabs who had no
reason for giving quarter and no intention of giving it.

V

The booty was immense, since a Persian knight carried most of
his portable wealth on his back, and Rustam’s army chest was
considerable. When accounts of what had been gained, and still more
when some of the tangible booty began to reach Medina, Omar and his
advisers decided there was something in this Persian business.
Sa’ad, who was resting his army after its victory, was directed to
form a military colony at Kufa, near the scene of the battle, and
push on later.

Hira town surrendered readily enough, and when the Muslims got
into the blackened country between the Tigris and the Euphrates
they found conditions basically similar to those in Syria—a
population composed of Aramaic peasants, who had been under both
economic and religious pressure from Aryan overlords, and who were
glad to see invaders of their own race. All Iraq fell into the
hands of the conquerors without further contest; they pushed on to
the Tigris, and when Yezdigerd offered to accept the line of this
river as a boundary and was refused, he evacuated his capital at
Ctesiphon and fell back into the mountains.

For the second Persian empire was done. The lost commander’s
throne could be replaced, but the sacred Diraish-i-kaviyani,
which had been sent to Medina to be cut up in pieces, could not.
With its loss the national morale sustained a blow hardly less
paralyzing than the one that resulted from Heraclius’ destruction
of the great fire temple, the more so because one topped the other.
Nor could the fighting men lost at Kadisiyah be replaced in any
important quantity, and their loss, like that of the symbolic
banner, had to be added to those sustained in the war with the
empire and the civil troubles that followed it. The Persian upper
class was even more seriously crippled than the English was to be
in the War of the Roses, and the organization of the state was such
that there was no yeomanry underneath, out of which a new upper
class could grow.

Yezdigerd, who was now old enough to be considered not to need a
regent, managed to assemble a force which met the Muslims again at
Jalula, the entrance to the mountains, but not long after Sa’ad
took Ctesiphon it was heavily beaten. Four years later the last
army of the Persian Empire was destroyed at Nihawand and Persia
became a Saracen province.

It took the full four years to reach this point, because the
advance into Persia proper represented something completely new,
strange, and changed in Saracen policy. Soon after Jalula,
Mesopotamia fell into their hands, but like the rest of the early
conquests, it was largely Semitic with tribal connections southward
and its subjection involved no more than the capture of a few
garrison towns. But Persia proper was different; it was inhabited
by an alien race, one that already had a strong religion of its
own. They heavily outnumbered any Saracen governing class that
could be placed in possession.

This was at least dimly visible at the time and was one of the
reasons for the delay in completing the work of Kadisiyah. But the
results of the battle, including the capture of Ctesiphon, made the
prospect irresistible. For if the booty of Rustam’s camp was
immense, that of the Persian capital was beyond all counting in
terms of purchasing power. It was one of the richest cities in the
world and it was taken under conditions that made plunder rather
than occupation practically obligatory. Arabs who had been living
on dates and camel’s milk suddenly found themselves with jewels
that represented the income of several lifetimes.

Persia thus became a promised land, where wealth could be had
for the taking, and a wave of Arabian emigration followed the
armies thither. But quite aside from the effects of sudden wealth,
which are pretty much the same everywhere, the capture of Persia
introduced new factors into the Muslim polity—factors not
covered by any revelation to the Prophet.

It has already been noted that the policy of the early caliphs
was to let non-Arab Christians and Jews keep their religion and
make them a source of revenue by means of the capitation tax. They
were so small a minority as hardly to be an irritant; the oyster of
the Arab state could readily convert them to pearl. But the classic
method clearly would not do in dealing with the Magian
fire-worshippers. There was no element in their religion on which a
Muslim could find agreement with his own as a basis for toleration;
they had no Solomon or Moses or Jesus, who have honored places in
the Muslim pantheon. But more importantly, as soon as the Arab
state had engulfed Persia, it found itself in possession of a huge
racially and religiously alien bloc, violently different in customs
and culture.

The Western peoples later developed systems of colonial
administration for dealing with this type of situation. But the
seventh-century Saracens had no long tradition of politics and
administration behind them, and no experience with any kind of
administration except the patriarchal, with an overlay of the
political-religious control from Medina. In their view the only
means of assuring political control over the new conquest was
through religious control; the Persians had to be converted under
the sword and the Magian religion wiped out, or Islam could never
control Iran.

The effectiveness of religious persecutions is often
underestimated. Mazdaism was wiped out in a practical sense; but it
took a good deal of doing, and the detestation with which
fire-worshippers are mentioned in the Arabian Nights shows
that the issue was not wholly dead a couple of hundred years later.
In the meanwhile the forced conversion of Persia completely changed
Islam itself. It ceased to be a racial movement; it necessarily
became more militant, more willing to expand the frontiers in every
direction. If so large a mass as Persia could be digested and
become a source of new sinews, there was no reason why other and
even larger entities could not be absorbed, and the command of the
Prophet to convert or slay was not a figure of speech, but
something deserving of literal obedience.

The attempt at complete absorption, of course, was only a
partial success. There were too many Persians and they had too much
political experience. In the end, under the Abassid caliphs, the
Muslim Persians came into command of the whole movement. They swept
away the patriarchal system Muhammad had known and designed for his
polity in favor of a new, monarchial, conquering system, which
completely forgot the democracy that was one of the Prophet’s most
basic doctrines.

5.
LAS NAVAS DE TOLOSA AND WHY THE AMERICAS WERE CONQUERED

I

At the beginning of the eleventh century the Christians of Spain
began to come up for air. There had never been much danger that the
Muslims would get the whole peninsula under their formal
jurisdiction. Despite an endless series of forays and several
invasions intended to be permanent, the Muslims never succeeded in
establishing a stable state much north of the line below which the
olive grows—a matter which should engage the attention of
some economic historian, though there is no visible correlation.
The major northward drive, of course, was the one turned back by
Charles the Hammer at Tours in 732, and it is just barely possible
that a Moorish victory in that struggle would have resulted in the
establishment of a Muslim France. But it is no more than barely
possible; the absorptive power of the Arabs and their religion
found an easier field in the East, which is to say that there were
insufficient reserves behind the 732 invasion wave, while the
Franks were tough-minded as well as tough fighters, not good
subjects for conversion.

Neither were the Visigoths of Spain, for that matter, and there
was no compelling reason why they had to be, as in the case of
Persia. The Muslim occupation forces were more adequate, and the
religion readily found converts among the old Romanized population
of the peninsula, who under the Visigoths had become serfs. They
formed a reserve which gave the Muslims the necessary numerical
superiority over the old Visigothic aristocracy, who adapted to
Saracen rule by becoming Mozarabs, Saracen in dress and social
customs, but by religion still Christian, having their own courts
and magistrates.

The Muslim Spain that stabilized south of the line of the olive
after the failure in Gaul had certain internal pressures. These
rooted in the unwillingness of genuine Arabs to recognize Persians
and Berbers as belonging to the same level of humanity, Muslim
though they were; the quarrels of the various tribes; and the
personal ambition of the emirs who were their heads. As long as the
dynasty of the Omayyad (strictly Spanish) caliphs lasted, these
stresses were easily held in check. The caliphs always had
available the powerful corps of the Slaves (with a capital), serf
soldiers, a typical Muslim institution, which was to reappear in
the Janisseries of Turkey and the Mamelukes of Egypt. The Slaves
were strong enough to overawe or overcome any loose alliance of
divisive forces. Also the caliphs enjoyed an unusual range of
authority. They were not only civil and military leaders, but also
the heads of religion, the only true interpreters of the word of
God. It was as though the Pope were also absolute monarch of France
and field commander of its armies. Finally, the Omayyads were
greatly beloved by their subjects; even the Mozarabs found no
objection to living under their rule.

The result was that Spain under the Omayyad caliphs was immune
to whatever exterior pressure could be applied by the tiny
Christian states of the north. It developed the most solid and
brilliant civilization in the Europe of the period, with
achievements in science, the arts, and literature far beyond
anything the nascent northern or Italian states could offer, or
even the decadent Byzantines. It was no earthly paradise, but it
was a system that worked. The rulers of Galicia, Leon, Castile,
Navarre, Aragon, the county of Barcelona, could make no headway
against the unified strength of the caliphate or the willingness of
its subjects to remain subjects. While the Christian kingdoms
squabbled among themselves, they were forced to pay tribute to
Cordova, where the caliph had his capital.

This state of affairs began to come to an end with the death of
’Adb-ar Rahman III, the great caliph. He was succeeded by Hakam II,
who was too much interested in literature to fulfill his combined
duties as Pope, chief justice, and general. Most of the work was
turned over to a vizier named Abd-’amir, known historically as
Almanzor, from a title he assumed, meaning "Victorious with the
help of God." Almanzor reorganized the army by importing Berbers
from Africa and bringing in paid soldiers from the Christian
states, and he conducted the endemic war with the Christians so
vigorously that he was able to storm Barcelona and destroy the city
of Leon, all but one tower, which he left as a monument.

Not even the death of Hakam mattered. Almanzor consigned the
successor, Hisham II, to an even more cloistered existence than his
predecessor, gained favor with the religious leaders by burning
Hakam’s secular library, and was in a fair way to breaking the
boundary of the olive line when he died in 1002. What followed was
as typical of a Muslim state as anything in the Thousand and One
Nights. Almanzor had been arbitrary; the son who succeeded him
as vizier was not only cruel in addition, but far from orthodox and
utterly incapable of controlling the tribal leaders, who had no
taste for Almanzor’s army reorganization program. There was a
confused series of sectarian and personal revolutions, in the
course of which Hisham II disappeared, and after several nominal
caliphs of various provenances had failed to consolidate the
government, a council of state declared the caliphate abolished in
1031.

At once everything fell into inextricable confusion and the
solid, civilized state that had seemed certain to gobble up the
peninsula and even to extend beyond dissolved into a fair imitation
of England under the Saxons. In every city, in every district,
there arose petty kings, the kings of the taifas (from the
Arabic "tribe"), each of whom was chiefly ambitious to restore the
fallen caliphate under his own authority. The institution of slave
soldiers, which had been so valuable a cement in a united
caliphate, disappeared after a brief period in which they played
kingmakers; there was insufficient continuity at the head of state
to keep them going. Muslim Spain was ready to be taken over by the
Christians.

But the Christians were not ready to take it over. In the tiny
northwest corner never conquered, in the pockets along the Pyrenees
out of which the new kingdoms grew, the tradition was invincibly
Visigothic, that is, Gothic, and the Gothic tradition was one of an
equal division of inheritance. Time and again the kings of Leon,
Castile, Aragon, and Navarre succeeded by force or marriage in
pulling together dominions of respectable size, only to dissipate
them by dividing the heritage among sons and daughters. Helped by
the Spanish geography of relatively small and fertile valleys
surrounded by mountains through which the communications were poor,
and still further encouraged by very real differences in custom,
method of life, and even language induced by that geography, the
process of fraction continued wearisomely and interminably. Galicia
and Leon looked out on Biscay and their contacts were across it;
Castile had little commerce except with the Moorish states; Navarre
straddled the Pyrenees and faced obstinately north; Aragon and
Catalonia were Mediterranean powers. The whole of the central
plateau, where these forces might have achieved union, was still in
Moorish hands at the fall of the caliphate.

The result was that the irregularly periodic divisions of the
Spanish kingdoms following a new succession were invariably
succeeded by wars among the successors, each anxious to obtain the
entire patrimony. Inevitably one of the successors would call in
the help of the single great power to the south; and as soon as
that broke up, the taifa kings as persistently sought help
from the north in their efforts to reunite the caliphate.

Thus the eleventh century in Spain was occupied by an endless
chain of small wars and civil wars, Christian against Christian,
Muslim against Muslim, with contingents from both parties fighting
indifferently on either side. Ruy Diaz de Vivar, the Cid Campeador,
was held the perfect knight and champion of his nation and
religion; but he spent more of his active career fighting for
Muslim princes than he did for Christian, which, if it made
excellent literature, did not make much sense.

II

In this period of pointless minor wars the character of military
operations in the peninsula became fixed along lines that diverged
considerably from those operative elsewhere in medieval Europe or
Asia, and which in turn deeply affected the life of the
communities, as military operations do in a land where the main
business is war. As elsewhere, the cross-raiding system developed
as soon as the militant units became so small that major operations
for the capture of cities were difficult; as elsewhere, the defense
against cross-raiding became the castle.

The difference lay in the intensity with which both were
applied. The raids in Spain were more frequent and became more of
an object in themselves; it was always both legal and moral to
increase resources by taking them away from the party of the other
religion, and if the Christian King of Aragon had some Muslims in
his pay, the Christian King of Castile could always attack them as
Muslims rather than Aragonese. Peasant serfs were a major item in
the booty of these raids; they could be settled on one’s own soil
and become a source of honor and profit. To protect them the
castles were much more numerous than in the rest of Europe, and
even the villages were in some sense fortresses, closely packed
small stone buildings from which the tillers of the soil went forth
in the morning and to which they returned at twilight.

Tendencies present elsewhere were also intensified among the
military forces which took part in these constant raids. Infantry
moved too slowly, and in a country where the only middle classes
were in the industrial and mercantile groups of the cities, there
was little material for recruiting this arm. The normal and
decisive weapon was cavalry, in a proportion of about four to one.
A technical non-development also helped keep infantry in its place:
the crossbow was only being reinvented in Italy and Denmark, still
was excessively rare and not well made in Spain. The country
provides few woods from which decent longbows can be made. The
usual type was the Turkish horn bow, a short wooden weapon backed
with leather, a horseman’s arm for use at close range. That is, the
infantry had no missile weapon that could make cavalry keep its
distance, and they were neither trained well enough not equipped to
stand on the defensive with pikes. The usual battle formation, when
things came to a battle, was for the spear-armed infantry to form a
front line, kneeling on the left knee, with archers just behind to
conduct the preliminaries. When the arrows were exhausted or the
moment became propitious, these footmen got out of the way and the
cavalry began the real business of fighting.

Since Spain is a rough country, a large proportion of this
cavalry was mounted on mules, especially among the Muslims. Mostly
spear- and swordmen, the tactics of the cavaliers were considerably
influenced by the skirmishing methods descended from Khalid. Since
the deficiencies of the available bows were widely felt, there
developed a peculiarly Spanish form of light horse called
genetes. They wore a heavily quilted form of gambeson in
lieu of armor and carried javelins, about three feet long, with a
seven-inch metal head, whose accurate balance has been much admired
by military archaeologists. They were very accurate and deadly.

Through the complex of raidings and battles of the minor dynasts
there appeared a tendency in favor of the Christian powers. It was
observable in small details: with their firmer industrial base
extending back into France, the Christians were the better armored;
their opponents held fast to traditional ways and ideas, such as
that a shield covered with the hide of the Atlas antelope could not
be penetrated by anything. Christian siege engines were better, and
better used. The tribal organization of the Muslim armies was less
efficient than the knight-and-retainer system of the Christians,
who could take in anyone on the basis of efficiency instead of
being forced to accept armies recruited by the lottery of birth.
And in spite of usurpations and family quarrels there was more
permanence of tenure, more orderly succession, and more established
administration among the Christian nations than the Muslim, where
every officer of state could aspire to become the state itself.

By the end of the century Castile had crossed the olive line and
taken Toledo. Saracen Seville and most of the southeast were paying
tribute, while Raymond-Berenger, Count of Barcelona, had
practically reached the Ebro. The situation had become so serious
from the Muslim point of view that the petty kings of the the
taifas took a strictly exceptional step: they banded
together, and an embassy from the federated rulers of Badajoz,
Seville, Granada, and Cordova went to ask the help of their
coreligionists in Africa.

III

It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. While the Spanish
Muslims were splitting into fractions of fractions, the Murabitin
Berbers, or Almoravides, had built a powerful united empire with
overtones of religious revival in western Africa. It extended from
Senegal to Algeria, and as usual in Muslim countries, religious
revival was accompanied by an outburst or both military ambition
and military strength. For the moment the empire of the Almoravides
was the most powerful Muslim state in the world, and the invitation
from Spain was a heaven-sent opportunity for the use of its
energies.

The Berbers came, then, under their Emperor Yusuf ibn Tashfin
and, with the help of the kings of the taifas, defeated
Alfonso of Castile in a great battle near Badajoz, with such loss
that the Christian advance was stopped and some parts of the line
turned back. Then the petty Saracen kings discovered that they had
imported more than military assistance. In the train of Ibn Tashfin
came a considerable group of faqihs, who may be homologated
to religious revivalists or Puritan preachers, and who were by no
means pleased with the liberty of religion accorded to Christians
and Jews by the Spanish Muslims. At the same time Ibn Tashfin’s
Berber hillmen were very much pleased indeed with the wealth and
luxury they found in Spain, and proceeded to help themselves. By
1111, under Ibn Tashfin’s successor, ’Ali, the taifa
kingdoms had been wiped out except in the northeast and Muslim
Spain was a part of the Almoravide state, with Cordova as its
capital.

The wars went on, but as border wars of the usual cross-raiding
type; the Aragonese succeeded in reducing Saragossa, and the
Castilians were not ejected from Toledo. But there things hung;
through all the middle years of the twelfth century the Christian
kingdoms were racked by a distressing series of dynastic troubles
that reduced them to black anarchy, while on the Moorish side of
the line the Almoravides were exchanging military habits for the
pleasures of civilization. They won most of the battles along the
frontiers, but gained little territory, and at home the new luxury
lost them the support of the orthodox. The Almoravide empire became
subject to a group of independence movements that tore it to
pieces. The taifas were back, and north and south the
pattern was repeating.

It was repeating in another sense also. While the later
Almoravides were wrangling among themselves in Spain, there
appeared in the Atlas a young man named Abu Muhammad ibn Tumari,
son of a lamplighter, who began preaching against luxury and the
relaxation of the laws of the holy Qu’ran. He claimed prophetic
revelations, led mob attacks on wineshops, and started riots in
which overdressed individuals got themselves hurt. Ascetic
fanaticism is easily aroused in people of his race and background,
and like Muhammad the original, he was lucky enough to find early a
convert who had considerable qualities as an administrator and a
solider, Abd-el-Mumin. When Muhammad ibn Tumari retired to a
monastery to pray, Abd-el-Mumin took over. For two years after the
prophet’s actual death revelations continued to come from his
retreat, all favorable to Abd-el-Mumin, and the movement spread
like a current in an ocean through the whole of North African life.
By 1149, Abd-el-Mumin was Emir of Morocco, and when he died in 1163
his territories were already coterminous with those that had
belonged to the Almoravides and were reaching beyond.

The imperializing sectarians were the Almohades or "Unitarians."
Son and grandson of Abd-el-Mumin were both able and fanatical.
Their outriders reached Spain in 1146, at the instance of one of
the reformist, independence-movement chiefs, and by 1172 they had
swallowed the whole of the Muslim territory.

There were these differences between them and the Almoravides
they replaced: they kept the capital in the Atlas mountains of
their origin and thus did not so readily succumb to pleasures
forbidden by the Qu’ran, and they came down hard on Jews and
Mozarabs, who emigrated to the Christian kingdoms by the
thousands.

In all this there was little to promise any real change in the
repeating pattern of periods of anarchy and recovery on both sides
of the border—or if change was indicated, it was in favor of
the Muslims. By 1195 they had succeeded in maintaining a stable
union of Spain and Africa through three generations and developing
to the full the inherent military qualities of religious
fanaticism. In that year Ya’cub, the Almohade emperor, for the
first time threw the full strength of the combined African-Spanish
military establishment against the northern border.

IV

His objective was the Castile of King Alfonso VIII, remarkable
man, about whom perhaps the most remarkable thing was his good
fortune. He was lucky to be a king at all. His grandfather had
united the crowns of Castile and Leon, but when he died it was
found that his will made the usual split. Alfonso’s father died
within a year, leaving that young man an infant king, whether of
one and a half or three years is still a matter of dispute. The
accession of a baby in that age was an invitation; Leon and Navarre
promptly began taking Castilian castles and cities, while the
members of the great families challenged each other in private wars
whose objective was obtaining the regency.

The normal thing is such cases is for the baby to get lost in
the shuffle; Alfonso not only escaped, but even achieved an
unusually good education. The latter was probably due to the Lara,
one of the imperially-minded families, who for a long time had the
lead in the struggle for custody of the crown over the rival family
of Castro. The king was still in his early teens when he got away
from the Lara, but at once there coalesced around him one of those
outbursts of unselfish patriotic loyalty which only Spain can
produce. It seemed that practically every grandee in the country
had only been waiting for Alfonso’s appearance to get rid of the
Castros and Lara. Surrounded by a cavalcade which grew in numbers
and importance at every moment, he made a tour of the communes to
accept their allegiance personally (something very important in
that part of the Middle Ages) and got the capital of Toledo back
from the Lara by surprise.

It took a matter of years for the young king to get things
firmly into his own hands, and Alfonso’s luck arranged that these
should be the years when the Almohades were extremely busy in the
south with the kings of the taifas. He was also lucky in
having a daughter very early in the game and marrying her to
another Alfonso, second of the name to rule in Aragon. Aragon was
the one Spanish kingdom that had no particular ambitions in the
peninsula at the moment; to it had fallen the heritage of the
counts of Barcelona, whose interests lay mainly beyond the
Pyrenees. The marriage alliance with Castile thus worked out a good
deal better than most such alliances; the lucky Alfonso of Castile
got abundant help in recovering what had been lost to Leon and
Navarre. By 1175 he was strong enough so that the Christian
kingdoms were agreed that more could be gained by fighting the
Moors than by fighting each other and the advance toward the south
was resumed.

By this date a new element had entered the military situation in
the formation of the great military monastic orders of Calatrava,
Santiago, and Alcantara. For some reason which should interest a
social historian as much as the line of the olive should an
economist, celibate military communities have been a success from
the time of the Mamertines down through the Jomsvikings to the
Janissaries, and conditions in Spain were exceptionally favorable
for their development. The orders provided the Spanish kings with
something they had never had before—a body of disciplined
professional soldiers and, moreover, a body whose religious fervor
equaled that of Almohades and who were not interested in quarrels
between one Christian kingdom and another, but only in breaking the
heads of the infidels.

The result was a canalization of energies toward the Moorish
frontier, and between 1175 and 1195, nearly twenty years, the
advance from both Castile and Leon was steady. There were no
spectacular gains unless Alfonso’s capture of Cuenca by siege could
be called one, but the chain of posts moved forward. It took time
for the movement to become apparent in an age of leisurely
communications, but the pressure was there and it brought Ya’cub
and the African army into action.

The armies of Ya’cub and Alfonso clashed at Alarcos on July 18,
1196, and the result was a crushing defeat for the Castilian king,
who tried to die among the spears and had to be forcibly led away
from the field. The chronicles speak of 25,000 Spanish casualties,
which seems very high indeed, but medieval chroniclers seldom
exaggerated the losses on their own side. Toledo, Alcala de
Hermanes, and Cuenca were besieged, Muslim columns snaked through
Castile, and the kings of Leon and Navarre seized the occasion to
snatch a few castles in the north. Alfonso was forced to make a
humiliating truce with the Moors.

At this point he was saved by two pieces of his usual luck.
Ya’cub was a dying man and had to go back to Africa to set his
affairs in order, while Alfonso II of Aragon became a dead man and
the succession fell to Alfonso the Lucky’s grandson, Pedro II. This
young man, twenty-two at the date of his succession, has been
described as "a marked and curious character." He was all of that:
a genuine knight-errant, right out of some lay of chivalry, and
placed in many of them by the troubadours, with whom he was a great
favorite. He also had notable accomplishments as a lecher; it is
related of him that he once spent the night before a battle in such
a manner that he could not stand at Mass and had to be hoisted onto
his horse by a squire. His romantic instincts flared up at the tale
of his grandfather’s misfortunes; he put all the weight Aragon
could swing into the scale, and it was his intervention at least as
much as Ya’cub’s approaching demise that made the truce
possible.

On both sides it was rather definitely recognized as a truce
instead of a peace and on both it was followed by a slow-paced
gathering of forces to carry on the struggle to a definitive
result. It was 1200 before Alfonso of Castile found himself strong
enough to denounce the truce. Ya’cub had been succeeded the year
before by his son, Muhammad al Nazir, who had a holy war preached.
It was a period more or less of stasis in the Muslim Near East; the
Seljuq Turks had fragmented, the Byzantine Empire and the crusader
kingdom in Palestine had developed enough stability to make Muslim
invasion there temporarily unprofitable, and there was unemployment
among fighting men. Muhammad was able to recruit an army stated
(probably inaccurately) at 600,000 men, all the way from Persia and
Nubia.

In the meanwhile the Christians decided that they too could play
the holy war game. Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo, one of the most
militant prelates of the Middle Ages, went to Rome, secured the
proclamation of a crusade with generous indulgences from Pope
Innocent III, and made a tour of the courts of Western Europe,
preaching the good cause. The response was excellent; in the spring
of 1212 there assembled at Toledo a number of knights set at
60,000, which is as much of an underestimate as the figures for the
Muslims are an overestimate, since each knight included in his
retinue enough supporters to double or treble the number of
fighting men in line.

They did not all stay. A host of this size must have placed a
severe burden on the logistic equipment available in a city of no
great size, and French knights speedily became disgusted with the
proud ways of the Castilians and the lack of opportunity for
profitable forays. When King Alfonso moved south for the test he
had with him only the contingents from his own realm, those of the
knightly orders, a rather small group led by King Sancho the Strong
of Navarre and a rather large one led by the romantic Pedro of
Aragon. It was, nevertheless, the largest army ever assembled in
Christian Spain, and it was facing the largest Moorish one. There
would be a decision.

V

Muhammad al Nazir had a strategy, and his intelligence
organization seems to have been better than anyone would have a
right to expect. His army was spread out for the siege of various
castles. When his forward elements reported contacts with Alfonso’s
forces at Malagon, Calatrava, Alarcos (the Christians were
apparently marching straight down the valley of the Bullaque), the
Muslim leader pulled back behind the Sierra Morena chain and placed
strong contingents in all the passes. He was perfectly aware that
the specific weaknesses of a medieval knightly force were in its
lack of cohesion and inability to solve the supply problem during a
long campaign. He intended to make his opponents fight for the
passes at considerable disadvantage or (what was infinitely more
probable) break up and go home. He was near his own base, had
provided magazines of good in the cities, and even remount depots
on islands in the Guadalquivir. In the reflex movement he could win
back all he left behind in the valley of the Guadiana and carry on
deep into Castile.

Alfonso’s army tested the mountain barrier at various points and
found the passes too strongly held for penetration. There was a
council of war, at which both Sancho of Navarre and Pedro of Aragon
advised retreat and a campaign against the bypassed castles still
held by the Muslims, while the Archbishop of Toledo was the only
one who supported the king in his desire to press on. At this
moment there appeared a shepherd, miraculously according to Spanish
legend, who offered to show the arm a defile by which the passes
could be turned. The offer was accepted; the army filed southward
through an area where the difficulties were considerable, but
purely of a geographic order, and on the heights exhibited
themselves to the Muslims.

At this point there is a rather curious gap in the story. Why
did not Alfonso attack at once? Muhammad certainly could not
have had his full strength at hand and the absent elements would be
among the mounted men who were his best armed. There was no
question of fighting anywhere but in that place. The Muslims were
across the only good road to the valley of the Guadalquivir; to the
Christian left were ragged and wooded mountains; any attempt to
slide rightward would have brought the Muslims down on flank and
rear. The fact remains that, for reasons we do not know, the
Spaniards spent two whole days in prayers and conferences before
deciding to attack.

During those two days and Moors set up their position on the
south bank of a small stream called the Campana Ronegadero, which
runs from west to east across the valley just north of the modern
town of La Carolina. The area is known as Las Navas de Tolosa, and
a nava is a small plain among hills; there were several of
these along the valley and one can picture the Moors formed across
them, with heavily wooded rocky slopes at their backs. They are
reported as having 100,000 mounted men in line, which may not be
far from correct, with a considerable number of infantry. In the
center of the line Muhammad placed himself, behind a palisade bound
with heavy iron chains, a Qu’ran in one hand, a sword in the other,
surrounded by warriors on foot, while an attendant held over his
head the official parasol which was the banner of the army.

His forces formed a single solid mass; the Christians were in
the customary three "battles" of a medieval army, King Alfonso in
the center with the Archbishop Rodrigo and the knights of Santiago
and Calatrava, Pedro of Aragon on the left, Sancho the Strong on
the right. Before the archbishop there was borne an enormous red
cross with a shield at its base, the emblem of the day. It was July
16, 1212.

The Christians attacked. There were probably the usual
preliminary skirmishings and challenges to single combat before the
fronts actually locked. This phase was followed by violent fighting
all along the line, not so much of the character of knightly
charges as of single combats interlocking, one man falling back as
another came forward. The chess game feature of war was utterly
absent and it is impossible to speak of tactics. On the wings the
Christians gradually forced the Moors back, and the farther they
pushed them the worse it became for the Muslims, for they were
being driven into trees and rocks, where their individual mobility
was lost and the heavier armor and swords of the knights had every
advantage. It must, nevertheless, have entailed some fairly
obstinate fighting, for this went on most of the day. In the
center, where an inevitable concentration of Muslim power had taken
place, things were different. The knights of Calatrava were nearly
wiped out and the Christians driven back.

Alfonso cried, "Archbishop, it is here we ought to die!"
Rodrigo replied, "No, sire, it is here we should live and
conquer!" He had a better eye than the king, for he had
observed that the Muslim counterstroke in the center had come up
against Christian spearmen on foot, stiffened by the knights of
Santiago; for once medieval infantry did not give way. The banner
of the cross was borne forward; there was a furious new attack
against the spur where Muhammad held his ground and at the same
time Sancho the Strong personally cut his way through the chained
stockade from the right. The emperor’s bodyguard began to go; he
had the official parasol lowered and the loss of that symbol of
leadership produced the usual effect on an Oriental army. The rest
became a massacre. The chronicles speak of 185,000 Muslims slain;
it is too many, but not by a great deal.

VI

There was no immediacy to the results. After the battle the
Christian army took a couple of towns and then broke up, as
Muhammad al Nazir had foreseen that it would. Two years later
Alfonso VIII died and his issue became involved in a series of
obscure rows that seemed to repeat the ancient pattern. The year
after the battle Pedro of Aragon was killed in the fight where he
had to be hoisted onto his horse, and his successors looked
eastward, to the Balaerics and Sicily. In the south the empire of
the Almohades collapsed into another group of anarchic petty
states.

That is, Las Navas de Tolosa appeared to decide nothing. In
reality it decided practically everything. It is unnecessary to
believe the figures of the chroniclers to realize that the flower
of the Moorish army had been wiped out, the point blunted, the edge
dulled. Within fifty years the Almohade dynasty became extinct, and
there was no replacement. There were no more Moorish raids into
Christian territory, only the gradual erosion of Muslim provinces
and cities, a process which reached its end with the conquest of
the final corner of Granada, which had long been tributary to the
Christian kings. As a matter of speculation, one may assume that
the Almohades would ultimately have succumbed to the same forces
that brought down the Almoravides, but as a matter of historical
fact, they did not. Their fighting aristocracy was destroyed on the
battlefield. The reserves behind Muslim conquests were always very
thin; the Muslims depended upon continual success, on the
acquisition of recruits to make war feed war, and when the
leadership was thus decisively wiped out, the whole structure that
it held together went to pieces.

This was the more important because of two factors, one
spiritual and the other tactical and technical. The overthrow at
Las Navas was not the destruction of an Eastern monarchy already
weakened by dry rot; what went down there was a revivalist movement
which, if not absolutely at its peak, had been strong enough to
attract recruits from across 50 degrees of longitude and 15 of
latitude. It was not merely the Almohades, but the Muslim world and
Muslim system that were defeated; and the manner of the defeat was
quite as important as the fact. A good part of Spain consists of
territory so much resembling North Africa that the hit-and-run
horse-archer tactics of the Near East were perfectly valid, and the
assumption had been that the whole peninsula was subject to such an
approach. Las Navas de Tolosa demonstrated on a large scale that
this was not a general geographical truth, that a Moorish army was
formidable only when fighting under its own conditions, and that it
could be forced to fight under conditions which it did not find
comfortable.

The lesson, never precisely set forth at the time, was by no
means lost on the later Christian kings. It helps explain why the
erosionary process on the Moorish states went on uninterrupted
until they were demolished. The battle, in fact, decided that no
part of Europe could remain a part of Africa, that the Western gate
was closed to the heirs of the Saracens; that European military
organization possessed a flexibility that Africans and Arabs could
not rival. The Spaniards could at least hold even with the Moors on
the latter’s own kind of ground; but when the Europeans could force
the choice of the battle area, the Moors were finished.

Much more than this was decided. With the battle of Las Navas,
the central plateau of Spain fell into the hands of the Kingdom of
Castile and the unification of the peninsula became possible.
Before it Spain was a geographical expression, no more a unit than
Germany or Italy at the same period, and much less of an entity
than England, Denmark, Poland, or even France. The battle placed in
the hands of the Castilian kings the headwaters of all the great
rivers and the control of the roads that paralleled them. The union
of Spain did not become a physical fact for another 250 years, but
it had been rendered inevitable by control of communications. When
the knot was tied, the expansion of Aragon in the Mediterranean had
made her the equal if not dominant partner, but it was a union and
not a conquest for which the foundations were laid at Las Navas de
Tolosa. It had been demonstrated that control of the central
watershed was vital to the possession of Spain—and also that
the Spanish kingdoms could work together for a common purpose when
that purpose was a crusade.

Centrifugal forces remained and it would be hard to exaggerate
their importance, but the remark of one of the Castilian kings when
asked to help in the defense of Jerusalem is worth repeating: "We
are always on crusade here, and so we do our share." It was
in that spirit, with that background, with the desire to smite the
infidel everywhere, with the secure knowledge that great things
could be achieved if the kingdoms worked together as they had at
Las Navas, that the conquest of the Americas was undertaken as soon
as the Moors were expelled.

6. JEANNE D’ARC
AND THE NON-CONQUEST OF ENGLAND

I

They met at the bridge of Montereau, where the Aube breaks
through the Burgundian highlands to join the Seine. The great duke
advanced with a handful of his retainers behind him and knelt at
the feet of Charles the Dauphin to show that their resistances were
over and there would henceforth be cooperation between them against
the English. As Duke Jean lowered his head, a man stepped forward.
It was Tanneguy Duchatel, the dauphin’s friend; and before anyone
could prevent him or even speak, he hewed at the duke with a
battle-ax, striking him just where neck joined shoulder. There was
a gush of blood and a shout; someone thrust one of the other
Burgundians through the belly with a sword, and the rest of the
suite were taken to be thrown in chains.

The date was 19 September, 1419, and the deed inaugurated a
series of troubles that tore France to pieces for the next thirty
years. Not that the kingdom had lacked evils before the Montereau
murder. The weight of the armies of Henry of England, fifth of the
name, bore heavily on the land, and he had taken nearly all of
Normandy after breaking the French knights at Agincourt. King
Charles VI of France was in the habit of going mad every summer;
Queen Isabeau had the morals of a slut and took pleasure in
informing the dauphin, her son, that he was a bastard. Under Jean
the Fearless, Burgundy had been welded into a powerful state,
reaching from the Alps to the North Sea, a fit rival for the whole
of France, and the Burgundians were currently in the possession of
king, queen, and Paris.

Dauphin Charles, to be sure, was at liberty and claiming the
regency as head of the national cause. But he was weak, slobbering,
sensual, sly, and surrounded by the faction of the Armagnacs, who
had no qualities but those of capable bandits. They stole the
dauphin’s money, left his soldiers unpaid, and used their authority
so ill that it was the people of Paris themselves who had driven
them out and brought the Burgundians in. It was the same elsewhere.
When Henry of England besieged Rouen, the people defended
themselves bravely, but after the place was forced to surrender,
the lords and knights were so disgusted with the dauphin’s party
that hardly any of them refused to take the oath of allegiance to
the conquerer—arrogant and a foreigner, but at least able to
keep some order and to administer things with reasonable
honesty.

The arrogance might have offered France an avenue of escape.
Henry, who had begun the war by asserting the old Plantagenet claim
to the whole realm of France, secretly advised Duke Jean of
Burgundy that he was willing to settle for the hand of Princess
Katherine, with Normandy as her dower. But after Agincourt he
raised his sights and said he must have Anjou and the suzerainty of
Brittany as well. At this point Tanneguy Duchatel first came into
the picture. It was impossible to keep a secret in any medieval
court, and that of Charles the Dauphin was fully advised of Henry’s
demand. Duchatel went to Duke Jean with an offer to let him control
the royal council if he would take up the good cause against the
English.

It was a trap and it was the prelude to the deed on the bridge
at Montereau. Charles the Dauphin and his Armagnac friends had no
real intention of striking hands with the Burgundians and had now
demonstrated it in the most unmistakable manner. It is reasonable
to ask whether they were quite aware of what they were doing, for
Jean the Fearless had a son named Philip, twenty-three years old
(which was ripe maturity for 1419), of approved skill both in
council and in war. The answer is probably that Charles never had
any mind of his own and the Armagnacs around him had no other idea
than revenge for the revolt of Paris against their party. They
simply did not care what happened after that.

What did happen was that Philip called a congress of Burgundians
and pro-Burgundians at Arras. Subject: how to take counterrevenge
on the dauphin for his murderous treachery. The decision of this
congress was that peace should be made with Henry of England on any
terms acceptable to him in order to make united war on the
scoundrel, Charles. Henry’s terms now moved higher yet; they now
included the hand of the Princess Katherine, recognition of himself
as regent for the half-mad king, and succession to the throne of
France, to the exclusion of the dauphin, who was described by his
own mother as a bastard. The terms were agreed, the alliance was
doubled by the marriage of Henry’s brother, John, Duke of Bedford,
to Burgundy’s sister, Anne. The treaty provided that when the
crowns of France and England fell into the same hands, it should be
a personal union only; the two nations were to preserve their own
laws and customs, be ruled by their own nationals, and the
Parlement of Paris was to be the supreme authority in France under
the king’s majesty.

Under this agreement English and Burgundians entered upon the
conquest of France. They made progress, since they had a perfectly
legitimate King of France on their side and Paris in their
possession. The remaining opposition was dumb rather than vocal,
passive rather than active, and consisted mainly in a series of
holdouts in towns, which turned the war into a procession of
sieges. But in the summer of 1422 Henry, called "Henry the
Conqueror" in France, fell ill of the conqueror’s disease of
exhaustion and died within a few weeks. In October mad Charles VI
followed him, and an infant less than a year old was proclaimed
Henry VI of England and Henri II of France.

II

This hardly seemed to matter. The regent and protector of both
realms was John Plantagenet, Duke of Bedford, and even in that able
and violent family he had few superiors. He spent most of his time
administering the French conquest, leaving England in the hands of
his brother Humphrey of Gloucester, who mismanaged things sadly,
got into trouble with the bishops and nobles, and had to be bailed
out periodically by brother John.

But the main line of the story lies in France. There Bedford was
not the equal of Henry the Conqueror, since very few men could have
been, but his relations with Burgundy remained excellent and he
behaved as though he really were steward of France for the
interests of France. He reformed the procedure of the courts of
justice and founded a university at Caen. The governors of the
great provinces "in the obedience of King Henri" were Frenchmen,
and the council of regency was overwhelmingly French. The estates
were called regularly, and contemporary chronicles speak of Bedford
with genuine enthusiasm. In short, he was succeeding in subduing
those parts of France that Henry V had only conquered. Guy de
Boutillier, who commanded the defense of Rouen against Henry V,
became the loyal provost of Paris for Henri II.

Yet the acceptance of the English was an acceptance at the upper
levels of society and beneath it the dumb opposition remained.
Bedford’s was an enlightened and conciliatory policy, but the men
down below who administered it were neither. They were invaders,
aliens, "Goddams," and they behaved like it. When they came to a
town they took the eggs and the hen, the milk and the cow, and
usually raped any available women. The Burgundians, who at least
spoke a kind of French, were not much better; and on those lower
levels there was a pronounced tendency toward brawls.

This was not true of the great towns, of course, where the
higher officers could maintain order, but the Anglo-Burgundian
occupation came down hard on the countryside. Its weight was
accentuated by the conditions of the war. The English occupation of
Normandy was fairly solid, and no particular police operation was
needed, while in Picardy and northern Champagne, Burgundy was the
lawful duke, and the invaders need not put in an appearance as
such. But in Maine, Anjou, the Ile de France, southern Champagne,
there were everywhere little islands of resistance, everywhere
towns flaring up, possessors of single chateaux who held for the
dauphin. Through this amorphous polity trailed bands of English and
Burgundians, looking for enemy holdings with intent to put them
down to the accompaniment of plunder, and claiming they had found
opposition whether it was there or not.

The Anglo-Burgundians simply did not have men enough to wipe out
these islands of resistance systematically. The population of
England was just recovering from two bouts with the Black Death and
stood at something like 2 million; that of the territory
compromised in modern France was about 20 million. Some of these
latter were Burgundians, pro-English, or still belonged to the
empire, but the proportionate French numerical superiority was
still prodigious, and during Bedford’s regency the French still had
the services of a considerable number of Scots.

In themselves numbers were no bar to an ultimate English
conquest. England itself had passed under the rule of Normans quite
as small proportionately, and Alexander the Great conquered the
whole East with not much more than double the number of men Bedford
could deploy in France. But weight must be given to local
conditions. South of the Loire and all along its length there were
bridgeheads in the conquered north, held by a French government
which, however despicable, however incompetent, could claim to be
the legitimate government of France. While it remained in
possession of a considerable stretch of territory, while it was
still able to raise armies and levy taxes, while it had an
administrative center, the conquest was incomplete. It had been the
lack of any administrative focus for resistance that led to the
acceptance of conquerors in Persia and later in England; it was the
destruction of such a focus that made Las Navas de Tolosa
decisive.

The state of the art of war also had a good deal to do with
conditions. Nearly a hundred years before, the Edwards of England
had replaced feudal levies by a system of long-term paid
professional soldiers and worked out a tactical doctrine that made
the most of this material. Basically this consisted of drawing up a
solid block of men at arms on foot, using spear, sword, and
battle-ax; on the flanks of this formation were thrown forward
strong triangles of archers, covered by the sharp stakes they
carried. The English then awaited attack. Knightly cavalry piled up
under archer fire; men at arms on foot could not get through it
without paralyzing losses. The theme was played in all variations
at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Aljubarita, and in a dozen minor
contests. If the enemy refused to attack, the English waited for
the operation of the disruptive forces Muhammad al Nazir counted
on, then went somewhere else, wherever they pleased. As paid
professionals they could afford to make a long campaign. But they
usually drew their attack because, aside from other considerations,
chivalry forbade their opponents not to attack.

There existed at the time no real method of dealing with this
English hedgehog of armed men. No armor would keep out a shaft from
an English longbow; it fired so rapidly and had such range that
other hand-borne missile weapons could not be brought against it
and the archers were so mobile that heavier weapons were useless.
To be sure, the longbow required a period of training from
childhood up, but this did not matter in a country still largely
forested, where the normal method of supplying the cooking pot was
by hunting, and in a service of professionals, where archers had
nothing to do but be archers. The total result was that an English
army in the terrain where it operated was incomparably the best in
Europe, and fully aware of the fact.

There were never as many of these English archers as the
commanders wanted, and they had no siegecraft to speak of. Cannon
were not yet of a force to deal with strong stone walls nor of a
mobility to be taken into the field. The normal method of taking a
fortress was by starving it out, since escalade was expensive in
manpower when it failed, and manpower was the specific
shortage.

Thus the war in France under Bedford’s regency was a repetition
of Henry V’s: a long series of sieges, spotted with occasional
battles. The most important of the latter was at Verneuil in 1424,
where the French managed to gather a considerable force under the
young Duke Jean II d’Alencon, with a large Scottish contingent. The
only difference from the classic Anglo-French battle pattern was
that Alencon detached a flying wing to attack the English baggage
train as a preliminary to falling on the rear of the line of
archers and men at arms. Bedford had foreseen this and left a
strong archer contingent in charge of the train; they cut the
flying wig to pieces and counterattacked so heavily that the French
front collapsed. Alencon was taken; Bedford reported over 7,000
French dead or prisoners, which, if true, made Verneuil as great an
overthrow as Agincourt.

The old magic thus still held and the war of sieges went on,
with the line of the English obedience gradually but inexorably
advancing. It advanced only gradually because Bedford had to keep
going back to England to unravel the tangles set up by his brother.
But by 1427 affairs there were in so much order that Bedford came
back to take the general direction of France. The field army, about
5,000 strong, including some Burgundian auxiliaries, was placed
under Thomas, Earl of Salisbury, and ordered forward to the siege
of Orleans.

This was a sound strategic decision in a war of sieges. Orleans
covers the chief passage of the Loire and the one nearest to Paris;
it was the largest city remaining in the hands of the dauphin
(Bordeaux was English) and the symbol of his dominion. Moreover,
there is something almost mystical about the Loire line in French
military history. The light of later events says that no less than
three times—in 1815, 1871, and 1940—France has given up
after that line was passed; the light of earlier times shows that
when the Goths failed to break that line at Chalons from the north
and the Moors failed from the south at Tours, France stood.

At this date the city part of Orleans lay north of the river,
surrounded by a castellated wall. There is an island in the stream;
it held two strong towers, the "Tourelles," connected with the city
by a masonry bridge, and with an outwork on the south bank by a
drawbridge. Salisbury, who was a reasonably good captain, judged
that the key to the place was this southern entrance and threw his
weight on it. After several failures he succeeded in storming the
outwork and the Tourelles on October 23. From this position his
cannon could play on several of the principle streets of the city;
and it is worth setting down that in this, the first important
siege where guns played a part, they were used exclusively as
anti-personnel weapons.

Around the outside of the walls on the north bank a series of
six stockaded works were set up, served from the English camps in
the rear. Salisbury had not men enough to make a complete line of
circumvallation or to guard it. The spaces between his forts were
covered by cavalry patrols, which naturally did not stop the
passage of messengers and of some small convoys. The river was not
fully blocked. Salisbury had every intention of drawing the lines
tighter and had begun work on it when he was killed by a cannon
ball on 3 November and was succeeded by his lieutenant, William de
la Pole, Duke of Suffolk.

Suffolk would qualify as a first-rate corps commander, but was
without the capacity to lead an army. He had served at Agincourt
and Verneuil and proved that he could command men in battle; he was
also a creditable diplomat, which seems to prove that there was
nothing basically wrong with his brain. But somewhere in his
faculties there was a gap, a circuit breaker between the fighting
man as such and the man who uses his brain for all purposes. It was
not in the usual medieval scheme of things for siege to be pressed
around the clock, as Alexander the Great had driven his siege at
Tyre, but Suffolk pushed far less than usual. The year turned
without any important additions to the siege lines, and as February
of 1429 came, with provision beginning to grow short in the town,
there was scarcity also in the camps around it.

At this point Bedford dispatched a provision convoy from Paris,
consisting largely of barreled herring for Lent, under escort of
1,000 archers and 1,200 Parisian militia. The commander was Sir
John Fastolf, who has passed into Shakespeare and legend as
Falstaff, the figure of fun, but who was really a very able officer
indeed. Someone in the dauphin’s circle heard of the expedition,
and the Comte de Clermont was sent with a hastily raised body of
4,000 men to intercept. They caught up with Fastolf at Rouvray on
February 12, and it was not the conventional French-English battle.
Fastolf formed his carts in a circular wagonburg (it is probable
that he had heard of the Hussites’ doing this sort of thing in
Bohemia), with the archers stop the herring barrels and the
spearmen operating between the carts and through the wheels.
Clermont’s men could make nothing of this novel defense; he was
beaten, his army broke up, and with it disappeared the last visible
French field force.

III

In the early part of the fifteenth century people took their
religion personally. Good angels and bad angels, who took the most
intimate interest in their charges, were of common acceptance, and
the great Henry the Conqueror quite seriously accused his
stepmother of practicing sorcery to the detriment of her husband
with the aid of an evil spirit. It is therefore not surprising that
when Jeanne d’Arc, the daughter of a well-to-do peasant of Domremy
on the border of Lorraine, began to hear voices and see visions she
should attribute them to angelic sources, or that when she confided
in others they should believe her.

The voices were those of St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St.
Catherine, and they came to her oftenest when she heard the
churchbells sounding for prayer, a ceremony which she performed
assiduously and with genuine devotion. Her family were dauphinists,
who at least once had been forced to take refuge in a castle to
escape marauding Anglo-Burgundian bands. When the news of the siege
of Orleans arrived, the voices became specific and insistent. They
told her that she must leave her home, for she was the instrument
divinely chosen to drive the English from the sieged city and to
see that the dauphin was anointed at Rheims as legitimate King of
France. At this date Jeanne was eighteen, a tall, strong girl with
black hair, not particularly good-looking.

When she informed her parents of her mission they were first
angry, then sad; they would rather see her drowned than in the life
of a camp, being perfectly acquainted with what that life meant for
an eighteen-year-old girl. Anger and pleas alike were fruitless;
finally an uncle took her to the Sieur de Baudricourt at
Vaucouleurs, the dauphinist leader in that area. It is possible to
imagine a certain amount of skepticism at Vaucouleurs when Jeanne
informed them that she had a divine mission to assume the arms of a
knight and save France, but this eroded away rapidly under the
influence of her peculiarly earnest and vehement method of
expression, the fact that she performed all the duties of the
Church with unquestionable piety and sincerity, and the other
background fact that friars had been traveling all through the
country preaching that deliverance from the Anglo-Burgundian
oppressors must be sought from heaven. There was nothing at all
incredible about the idea that this maid might be heaven’s
instrument; all of Vaucouleurs contributed to buy her a horse and
armor, and De Baudricourt supplied an escort to take her to Chinon,
where the dauphin was in residence.

There she encountered higher levels of skepticism. The first
incident that shook it was that of the identification. She was led
into a hall where three-hundred-odd people were gathered, among
them Charles, dressed rather simply, while many of the courtiers
were elaborately turned out. She walked straight up to the dauphin
and said, "God give you life, noble King."

"I am not the king," said Charles.

Jeanne said, "In God’s name, sire, you are the king and no
other. Give me troops wherewith to succor Orleans and guard you to
Rheims to be crowned. It is the will of God."

Charles was impressed enough to take her aside privately and ask
her for a sign. He got it. She told him about his doubts as to his
own legitimacy, fostered by his harridan of a mother, and about his
prayers for reassurance; and she added that his fears were
groundless.

This was enough for the dauphin; he assigned to her a chaplain
and an old knight, Jean d’Aulnon, under whom she studied the
management of horse and sword. The sign was not enough, however,
for many of the other courtiers and particularly Archbishop Renault
de Chartres, primate of France. The churchman was perfectly willing
to admit that Jeanne was supernaturally inspired; his doubt was
whether the inspiration was divine or demoniac, and he had her
taken to Poitiers for examination by the doctors of the university
there. The combination of unmistakable sincerity and piety with
correctness on doctrinal points added them to her list of
converts.

Six weeks had gone by since Jeanne had arrived at Chinon and she
was in a fever of impatience to complete her mission, saying that
her voices told her she had "only a year and a little more."
Charles sent her to Blois, where a small army had been collected to
cover a large convoy of provisions for Orleans, with the best
captains available—the young Duke d’Alencon, ransomed from
his Verneuil captivity, La Hire, Xaintrailles.

She made a striking figure in the camp, always clad in white
armor and riding a big black horse, which she managed with a
dexterity that excited admiration, carrying a white banner
embroidered with the lilies of France and a representation of
Christ in his glory. In an age when all news passed by word of
mouth and lost nothing in the passing, it was natural that tales
should gather around the figure of the Maid (as everyone was now
calling her), but at least some of them must have had foundation.
The matter of the sword, for instance. When they offered her one
she said no, the sword destined for her would be found at the
shrine of St. Catherine of Fierbois, in a coffer long unopened, and
it would be engraved with three crosses. The sword was unearthed at
the named spot; it was the one she ever afterward carried. There
was also the tale of the soldier at the gate of Chinon, who swore
when crowded as she entered the castle with her escort.

"In the name of God, do you swear," said Jeanne, "and you so
near death?" He fell into the moat an hour later and was
drowned.

That is, the men of the little army at Blois were convinced that
they were led by a miraculously inspired virgin, and the tale of
her spread. The impression was deepened by the Maid’s behavior in
her capacity as commander of the army. She left matters of maneuver
to the captains without much interference, but she allowed no
oaths, she drove whores from the camp with the flat of her sword,
she compelled regular attendance at Mass and confessionals; and she
was vigorous on points of strategy. Under her guidance it was
unquestionably the most moral army of the Middle Ages, and it was
glad to be so, for she had given it the thrilling assurance of
victory.

On April 25 she marched from Blois. She wished to move by the
north bank of the Loire, declaring that the English would neither
sally from their "bastilles," the forts around the city, nor from
the towns of Beaugency and Meung, which lay along the road. The
captains insisted on the south bank as more secure. They were
probably wrong: the medieval news service of gossip had functioned
very thoroughly during Jeanne’s delay at Chinon; the English knew
all about her and were worried. Not that there was any admission
that she was inspired by God or angels. The official English view
was that she was a witch, a sorceress; but this made her more
dangerous rather than less. Not many men of that period cared to
tamper with black magic.

She came up the south bank, then, and outside the town met Jean,
Comte Dunois, commandant of Orleans, an illegitimate son of Charles
VI’s brother. This man, already one of the most distinguished
soldiers of France, was impressed at once. Then came the incident
of the barges, hardest of all to explain, however one many
designate the stories of the sword and the swearing solider as
magnified tales. The provision convoy was following by boat and
Dunois pointed out that with the prevailing east winds it would be
impossible for the barges to get past the English forts at the
river’s banks.

Jeanne said, "You are deceived. Better succor do I bring you
than ever yet came to town or men at arms, for it is the aid of the
king of heaven."

Half an hour later the east wind dropped; an unseasonable,
improper, utterly impossible west wind blew up with the fall of
night, bearing a storm of thunder and rain, so strong that the
sailing barges could tow those without masts, and Orleans had its
provision. For the rest of his life Dunois never forgot it.

The news of this success of the sorceress did not do much for
English morale and the subsequent proceedings did still less.
Jeanne rode into the town during the storm that night, made a
solemn procession through the crowded streets the next morning,
went to the principal church, where a Te Deum was chanted,
and returned to the quarters provided for her, refusing to attend a
banquet. The next day she went to the walls and by trumpet and word
of mouth repeated a summons she had sent by heralds, bidding the
English to go home lest they suffer sorrow and shame. Sir William
Gladsdale, who commanded the Tourelles and the south bank outpost,
called her "the Armagnac whore"; she wept and made ready for
battle.

It is of some importance that although this girl of a little
over eighteen had now established her moral ascendancy among the
troops she had never been in a fight. That afternoon, while she was
lying asleep, Dunois believed he saw a weakness in the easternmost,
upriver English post, called St. Loup, and made a sally. It failed;
the troops were flowing back when Jeanne, roused by a sound which
she afterward identified as one of her voices, came riding into the
reflux, carrying her banner and shouting, "Hari! Go boldly in
among the English!"

Wild with recovered enthusiasm, they followed her; St. Loup was
taken and all its garrison put to the sword, except some few spared
at the insistence of the Maid. It was now the judgment of Dunois,
d’Alencon and company, that they had moral and material forces
sufficient to attempt something more serious than a single fort
and, moreover, that they had better do so because it was altogether
likely that the regent, Bedford, would be down on them with
reinforcements. Jeanne told them calmly that the siege would be
raised in five days. Whether it was she or another who suggested
the idea that the new enterprise would be an attack on the southern
bridgehead and the Tourelles, it was accepted at once. As much of
the garrison as could be spared were taken in boats to the southern
bank to join the men the Maid had brought with her and the command
was forward.

The date was May 7, and it was a desperate business, being
scaling-ladder work against strong walls. As Jeanne mounted one of
the ladders, an arrow went right through her armor between neck and
shoulder; she was carried to the rear, weeping with pain and shock.
The wound was dressed and she had begun to pray with her confessor
when word arrived that it was a repulse and Dunois had given orders
for a retreat to be sounded.

Jeanne sent for the commandant. "By my God," she said, "you
shall soon enter in there. Do not doubt it. When you see my banner
wave against the wall, to your arms again. The fort is yours. For
the present rest a little, and take some food and drink."

She was now recovered from the shock of the wound, but could not
carry her banner, which was borne by a soldier. As it went forward
and touched the wall, all the French made a concerted rush up the
ladders, while in the rear the Orleannais laid planks across the
broken bridge and sallied. The French went up, over, into the
outpost, and swept right into the Tourelles when Gladsdale was
killed by a cannon ball that took out the drawbridge under his
feet. Of the garrison 300 were killed and 200 taken.

The next day was Sunday; the Orleannais woke to see the English
forts north of the river in flames, but their troops drawn up for
battle before the city. Dunois was eager to go out and give them a
fight, but Jeanne said no. "In the name of God, let them depart,
and let us return thanks to God." Her view (which was the
soundest tactical sense, since one did not attack an English army
in the field with good chances) prevailed; instead of a battle, it
was a solemn procession around the walls, with services of
thanksgiving. Orleans was relieved.

IV

The event was not in itself decisive; there had been sieges and
reliefs all through the war, and although English morale had been
badly shaken by "that disciple and limb of the fiend called
Pucelle, that uses false enchantments and sorcery," they still had
strong forces in the field. There was Suffolk’s former besieging
army and a new one concentrated from various points by Bedford,
under Fastolf and John, Lord Talbot, already on the march into the
Loire country. Jeanne was in favor of neglecting both for a
progress to Rheims and the immediate coronation of Charles in
fulfillment of her mission, but the captains persuaded her that the
English field forces must first be dealt with.

At this point the gap between Suffolk the fighting man and
Suffolk the strategist becomes apparent. Instead of falling back to
rally on the Fastolf-Talbot force, he parceled his small army out
among the Loire towns—Jargeau, Meung, Beaugency. Jeanne moved
on Jargeau first and on June 12 took the place by assault when the
defenders flinched from the wall in the face of her black magic.
Suffolk the fighting man bravely tried to make a stand in the
streets and was taken with whatever men he had left. On the
fifteenth Jeanne and her people forced the bridge at Meung and took
that place too; next day they were around Beaugency. It was a town
of considerable strength and held the largest of Suffolk’s
detachments, but whether from utterly depleted morale or because
there had been no tie to assemble provision, it surrendered on
terms after only three days of siege.

Talbot learned of this on the day following and began to fall
back toward Paris. The region through which he moved was much cut
up by hedgerows and small clumps of forest, and it was not the
custom of the age to put out flank guards, but near Patay the
English commander learned that the French were close, without being
able to see too much of them. Instead of accepting advice to
continue the retreat, Talbot cried, "By God and St. George, I will
attack!" and ordered out the archers to form wings along the
hedgerows, while the remainder of his forces filed into position
behind them.

He did not realize how close the French were, or that they would
be driven by the urgency of the Maid, La Hire, and Alencon. The two
armies seem to have been moving along courses roughly parallel,
with the French even less aware than their opponents of the enemy’s
presence, when a stag was started and the English archers, just
beginning to fix their stakes along the hedge, raised a view
halloo. Jeanne instantly wheeled everything round with all the
vehemence she could impart to such a movement, crying that the men
at arms should not wait to form line but go straight in.

The archers were scattered before they could shoot, and Talbot’s
Burgundian and Picard auxiliaries, caught in column, were borne
down and away under weight of numbers and momentum in a dusty,
clanging, whirlwind melee. Baggage train and artillery, which had
been the head of the column, made a brief stand under their archer
guard; then they also went. Fastolf with the English knights came
up just in time to face the whole French force and then got out as
best he could, his men panicking. He was afterward accused of
cowardice, and though the charge was justly dismissed, enough of
the tar stuck to make the Shakespearean character. Talbot was
captured; more than a third of his army was destroyed and the rest
pretty well dispersed.

This now was decisive. Charles marched on Rheims and was duly
anointed on July 17, while Jeanne threw herself weeping at his
feet, her mission accomplished. In a strategic sense it did not
matter that she was persuaded by the courtiers to remain in the
field, that she failed in an attack on Paris in September, or that
in the following spring she was taken by the Burgundians and sold
to the English to be cruelly burned at the stake in Rouen.

Patay was locally decisive because it completed the wiping out
of two English armies. It is evident that Bedford must have
stripped his garrisons down thin to make up the Talbot force; when
Jeanne and Charles appeared after the battle, town after town went
over to the royal arms—Troyes, Chalons, Rheims, Soissons,
Laon. The Regent of England did manage to get together a field
force with which he operated all the following summer, but it kept
costing him more towns and the English domination of France slid
downhill to complete ruin.

It slid because, beyond the local decisions at Orleans and
Patay, an answer had at last been found to that English system of
war which enabled the smaller nation to bring France to the edge of
national collapse. Most obviously the solution lay in the release
of moral forces. In hoc signo vinces can be quite as useful
a military weapon as a sword or a cannon, as Sa’ad’s Saracens had
earlier demonstrated. Moral forces also ended the effects of the
good government with which Bedford was gradually securing northern
France. It was not that Charles could offer any better government;
practically everything was in the hands of his wretched court
favorites, justice was at a minimum, taxes at their peak. It was
not even that one government was English and the other French, for
Bedford’s administration was nearly all French. But Charles had
been given the direct support of the king of heaven through the
Maid, and he was God’s anointed; duty to him had become religious
as well as political.

This invalidated the Anglo-Burgundian method of conquering the
country by holding the towns, a method which rested on small
garrisons and acquiescence. It also had its effect on the morale of
the always outnumbered English professional soldiers, whether in
towns or in the field. The fall of Jargeau, the surrender of
Beaugency are evidential. But the fact that Jeanne released and
channeled moral forces in an atmosphere of mysticism and religious
fervor has been allowed to conceal something quite as
important—namely, that she and not the captains had found a
method of dealing with the strategy and tactics of the English
hedgehog.

This method was so simple that no one had been able to think of
it before: Jeanne simply refrained from attacking the hedgehog. It
has been suggested that her furious out-of-hand assault at Patay
was due to no more than a desire to come to handgrips with the
enemy as soon as possible. But she had an excellent opportunity to
close with the English on the morning after they burned their forts
at Orleans, with the moral factors heavily on her side, and she did
nothing of the kind; they were in formation. During the campaign
that followed the coronation, she had other opportunities to attack
English formations, and she made no such attacks. The weight of the
evidence says that at Patay the charge was made in a hurry
precisely to keep the English from setting up their invincible
defense.

Moral authority here reached over into the tactical field.
D’Alencon and Verneuil, like other French captains before him, was
involved in the concept of chivalry; if he failed to attack, he
would have been guilty of unknightly conduct and part of the base
on which his ability to command rested would have been taken from
under him. The fact that in all the battles of the Hundred Years’
War the French had a numerical superiority was plainly visible; the
facts that they were opposing one arm to the combined arms, that
they were amateurs fighting professionals, made no difference to
chivalry. But Jeanne had a moral authority that could override
chivalry and let her do what the tactics and strategy of the
situation plainly demanded.

Dunois, La Hire, the other leaders caught up the lesson, and
that they learned it was one of the main reasons why the English
were driven from France. They did not attack hedgehogs, they waited
to be attacked, and the defect of the English formation stood
revealed. It could not move.

It is probably fortunate that they lost in the long run. The
conquest of France on the lines begun by Bedford could hardly have
resulted in anything but a kind of French conquest of England.
Henry VI was half French by blood; he must inevitably have placed
the center of gravity of the dual crown in the larger kingdom and
set its interests first. This, of course, leaves out of account the
character of that unimpressive monarch, or the lack of it. He would
very likely have made out as badly in France as he ended by doing
in England. But the advisers, the great feudatories, the men
reaching for power would have been French and not English, they
would have set up a sort of second Norman conquest. The total
possible results defy speculation, but there were no such results.
Jeanne d’Arc took care of that.

7. VIENNA AND THE FAILURE TO
COMPLETE THE CRESCENT

I

In the early part of the sixteenth century there developed a
nexus of decision in Western Europe. It centered around five
men—two of them kings, one an emperor, one a religious
leader, and one a politician wearing the clothes of a religious
leader. Though all of them took advice and occasionally changed the
details of their policy, they were so consistent that it is
possible to deal with them in general terms.

One of the kings was Henry VIII of England; his policy looked
inward to England and outward across the Atlantic, and although his
support was eagerly sought by other members of the power group and
that seeking influenced many of their actions, he was always so
unwilling to do anything practical about affairs on the Continent
that he may be dismissed with the remark that he raised tides like
the moon and remained about the same distance.

The second king was Francis I of France, who thought of himself
as a knight-errant like Pedro of Aragon, and behaved like a bandit.
He inherited a realm which had become the first modern unified
state of Europe under Louis XI, Charles VII’s son, with the great
feudatories broken down, and a military system based on a
combination of artillery with heavy cavalry, especially designed to
deal with English armies of static archers and men at arms. In
Francis’ very first year of 1515 ambition took him to Italy, where
he encountered the Swiss pikemen and halberdiers, the terror of
Central Europe, at Marignano. It was one of the most gigantic
battles of the age. Two days of desperate fighting proved that the
new French system was quite as useful against pikemen as against
archers. "The drunken Swiss" were driven from the field; France won
the duchy of Milan and made with Switzerland a "perpetual peace"
that really turned out to be perpetual.

The war in which this took place was really part of the long
duel between the royal house of France and the ducal house of
Burgundy, which in Jeanne d’Arc’s time so nearly missed ending in
the completion of Henry V’s conquest. But the ducal house of
Burgundy had ceased being merely the greatest of the French
feudatories. By one of those marriages which caused a rival king to
ejaculate, "Tu, felix Austria, nube," its possessions had
fallen in with those of the Hapsburg Empire. By another, with
Joanna, the heiress of Spain (who, like all queens named Joanna,
ultimately went mad), that peninsula and its immense overseas
empire were added to the Hapsburg heritage. In 1519 the third
protagonist of this story, Charles V, attained the united
throne.

He inherited more than dominions that encircled France on every
side and a tradition of implacable hostility toward her. Charles
also acquired the Spanish military establishment, based on solid
blocks of heavily armored, thoroughly disciplined pikemen, with
little knots of arquebusiers at the corners: the tercias. At
Pavia in 1525 this establishment clashed with Francis and the
combination of fire power and push proved so far superior to what
France could put in the field, even with Swiss help, that the
French army was destroyed and Francis himself taken prisoner.

The event decided the fate of Italy, which in a practical sense
became a Spanish possession for two generations, but it did not
make things much easier for Charles, because of the politician in
the power complex. This was Pope Clement VII, who could never
forget that before his election he had been Giulio de’ Medici, a
member of the former ruling house of Florence. Neither in this
capacity nor as an Italian temporal potentate was he anxious to be
helpful to Charles, and in fact was so unhelpful that strains built
up to that sack of Rome, which is usually taken as the most
convenient date point for the end of the Italian Renaissance.

Quite as importantly the Holy Father procrastinated about
calling a general council of the Church, which Charles deeply
desired as a means of dealing with one of his leading problems, the
fifth member of the combination, Martin Luther. It is by no means
certain that a council would have extricated Charles from his
difficulties with the Reformers, for when the matter came to a
head, Luther had already pronounced his conviction of the
fallibility of councils to Charles’ face at Worms. By this date the
movement had taken on a certain nationalistic aspect in addition to
the religious. But the refusal of Clement to call a council made it
very certain that Charles would not easily get out of this
particular trouble.

There were the forces. They produced a long series of
French-Imperial wars that left everybody poor, without any
significant territorial changes after Pavia. These wars had the
technical characteristic of being largely conducted through siege
operations. After Pavia nobody quite dared to meet the Spanish
infantry in the field, and in any case, the plunder of a town at
reasonable intervals was one of the best methods of keeping
mercenary Landsknechts and terciaries to the line of
discipline.

By 1528 the situation of Western Europe had become not too
dissimilar from that in the Middle East at the date when the
Persian and Byzantine empires had exhausted each other just in time
to clear the track for the coming of the Saracens. Here also there
was a sprawling empire, short of financial resources, with part of
its population in a state of religious disaffection, engaged in a
great struggle with another entity.

The Muslims were at hand to take advantage of the situation here
also.

II

They were no longer the penniless Saracens of the desert, with
the drive supplied by a religion which had united a race, but a
closely organized and modern, if non-Western, state—the
Ottoman Turks. They were a clan which appeared in Asia Minor in
1227, nomads from the steppes and relatives of the Seljuq Turks.
The Seljuqs assigned them some territory around Ankara as a reward
for military services. The Seljuqs themselves had reached Asia
Minor earlier, as servants and fighting men for the later and more
luxurious caliphs, and soon owned everything; but they had no gift
of political organization, and as the clan system tended to
fragment where they were in permanent residence, they became a
group of quarreling independent principalities about the time the
Ottomans arrived on the scene.

These Ottomans had two stupendous pieces of luck. One was in
their royal family; in the course of nearly 300 years, down to the
point at which this narrative begins, that family produced an
unbroken succession of no less than nine extremely able
rulers—energetic, adventurous, cruel, just, and intelligent.
Conquest was their peculiar pleasure. No other family strain in all
history can show such a record.

The second piece of luck was Ala ed-Din, one of the members of
this family and elder son of Othman, the first sultan. He was a
philosopher and a theoretician, who willingly left the throne to
his younger brother Orkhan, and devoted himself to working out a
military and administrative system that would make the most of what
the Ottoman Turks had.

There were never very many of them, but they were all soldiers,
and being of nomad origin, soldiers who fought on horseback. When a
district was overrun, it was cut up into fiefs, each of which was
to supply a horseman. These fiefs were combined into districts and
the districts into larger counties under the authority of a
beylerbey. Thus far the system was feudal. There was a
provision that a fief did not necessarily fall from father to son,
each must must prove his own right by valor and service, but there
were similar statutes in early European feudalisms also, and the
Turkish setup might have taken similar lines of development but for
the unique additive supplied by Ala ed-Din.

This was the institution of the yeni cheri, Europeanized
as Janissaries. Their background was that the later caliphs of
Egypt had set up a body of slave soldiers called the Mamelukes; at
the same time in all Muslim countries the religious duty of
exacting tribute from all non-Muslims endured. Ala ed-Din combined
the two institutions by taking his tribute in the form of male
children. They were brought up in Islam, forbidden to marry or to
engage in trade, held under the strictest discipline and, except
for those who showed administrative talent, they were confined to
the camp from the age of twenty-five. They were infantry.

The Ottoman sultans thus had a celibate military community
within the body of their state, one whose only devotion was to them
and to Islam, and one whose every member was trained from childhood
in the sole business of war. With such an instrument in the hands
of the heads of state, and with such heads of state as the Ottoman
line provided, the feudal lords never had a chance to develop into
great feudatories, as in the West. They remained a body of
first-class cavalry and a rather loose aristocratic class, since
only the son of a feudal tenant could hold a fief.

The military organization thus combined a standing army of elite
infantry, whose cavalry wings could be increased in an emergency.
It was infinitely superior to anything in the West, and the
Ottomans proceeded to prove it, beginning with what was left of the
dying Greek Empire, since they were not too interested in subduing
other Turks. By 1355 what was left of the Byzantines in Asia Minor
had been wiped out; in 1361 Murad I crossed the straits, took
Adrianople, made it his capital, and began working on the Balkans.
Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro, Wallachia celebrate national
heroes for their resistance to the flood from the East, but it
always ended the same way, in another nation or district being
added to the Ottoman Empire. With each addition the number of
available fiefs and of children to be made into robot Janisseries
grew, a snowballing process without visible limit.

It was not even interrupted by an incursion of Mongols who
captured Sultan Bayezid I and kept him in an iron cage till he
died; nor by the fact that each succeeding sultan usually found it
necessary to have his brothers and cousins poisoned or strangled.
The supply of good blood in the Othmanli line seemed inexhaustible.
By the middle of the fifteenth century the whole of the Balkans and
Greece were Turkish and their fleets began to dominate the eastern
Mediterranean.

One of the specific excellences of that Ottoman line was its
ability to learn. It is not certain when and where they first
encountered cannon—probably in the hands of Venetian
sailors—but it did not take them long to discover that this
invention covered the one technical weakness of an army essentially
nomadic by habit and thought, its inability to handle siege
operations. The new device was adopted with enthusiasm, and under
the influence of the Turkish penchant for magnificence the Ottoman
heavy artillery speedily became the best in the world. When
Muhammad II reached the throne in 1451 he at once began casting
enormous guns that could throw stone balls up to twenty-five inches
in diameter; two years later he turned them on the greatest city in
the world and Constantinople became Istanbul.

It was a shock to Christianity, but all efforts to raise a
crusade encountered the fact that Christianity was thinking about
other things. Moreover, Muhammad failed to take Rhodes from the
Knights of St. John; his successor, Bayezid II, kept peace in
Europe except with the Hungarians, whom everyone regarded as little
better than the Turks; and his successor, Selim the Grim,
became involved in a series of wars in the East, in support of
Muslim orthodoxy against the Shi’ite heretics of Persia. It is
worth noting that his artillery won the wars for him and also
enabled him to take over Syria and Egypt.

In 1520 he died, and his son Suleiman, known to Turks as
Suleiman the Lawgiver and to Europe as Suleiman the Magnificent,
became the tenth sultan.

III

To contemporaries this seemed good news rather than bad. The
communications of the West with the Turkish court through Venice
were excellent, and people knew all about the new ruler—about
twenty-five years old, tall for a Turk, somewhat of sallow
countenance, with Tartar blood from his mother; very quick, both of
mind and body, delighting in romantic tales and the Muslim type of
chivalry, a linguist who could converse with his officers in most
of the Balkan dialects, knew Italian, was a master of Persian and
Arabic, and wrote poetry in his own language so well that even if
he had not bee a ruler he would have ranked as one of his country’s
leading poets. His interests were thoroughly Western; he had been
governor of European Turkey while his father was campaigning in the
south and east, and he cared nothing for Selim’s crusade against
the Shi’ite heretics. A despot, but an enlightened despot, on the
familiar model of Francis I and Charles V; Europe considered it
entirely possible to do business with a man like that. Finally, his
grand vizier and alter ego was a Greek turned Muslim, a man named
Ibrahim, of infinite charm and accommodation.

Europe overlooked two factors, not very surprisingly, since they
were buried in Muslim law and tradition. One was the fact that just
before his death, the late Grim Selim had become Caliph of all
Islam, Commander of the Faithful. In the theory of Muslim law this
office should be in the hands of a member of the Prophet’s clan,
the Koreish. The last caliph of the blood was a shadowy creature,
who held a phantom court at Cairo; when Selim acquired Egypt, the
office was resigned to the sultan without much urging. Suleiman
thus inherited the position of the early caliphs as combined
emperor, Pope, and commander in chief of the armies of a Muslim
world that had abruptly become very nearly united, thanks to his
father’s overthrow of the heretical units and the expulsion from
Spain of the last remnants of the Almohades.

The second factor overlooked in the West was the compilation of
a code of Muslim law, which took in not only the Qu’ran, but also
the sayings of the Prophet recorded from oral tradition and the
decisions of the early caliphs. The code was not complete when
Suleiman reached the throne, but there was enough of it, added to
previous codes, to establish the main line, and one point in it was
absolutely clear: it was the plain religious duty of Muslims to
conquer the unbeliever, convert him to Islam, or impose tribute
upon him. It is not recorded that Suleiman was particularly devout,
but many of his officers were, and the Janissaries, who were
beginning to realize themselves as an influential guild, were not
at all happy unless there was a war on.

The sum of these forces was that Suleiman’s interest in the West
became an interest in conquering the West, and he began with a
demand on young King Lajos (or Louis) of Hungary for tribute. Young
King Lajos had the ambassadors killed, which would have been a
fairly good cause of war even if nobody were trying to provoke one.
Suleiman set the troops in motion, and without difficulty captured
the two great border fortresses of Szabacs and Belgrade. They were,
in fact, taken almost too easily; not only did Suleiman wish to
shine, but also the vizier, Ibrahim, pointed out to him that the
realm had expanded so rapidly to east and south that some labor of
consolidation in those directions would be necessary. The shining
part of the program was temporarily accomplished by an attack on
the Knights of St. John of Rhodes, who were forced to surrender
after a tremendous defense. Suleiman was still engaged in
distributing fiefs, putting down local troubles, and organizing
administration in Egypt and Kurdistan when he received a letter
from the King of France.

It was written from Madrid, whither Francis had been taken as a
prisoner after Pavia, and it urged the sultan to press on against
Hungary and the empire for glory and booty; France would do her
part by keeping Charles V occupied in a two-front war. The embassy
acted as a detonating charge; Suleiman dropped his administrative
details into the hands of subordinates and turned in the direction
to which ambition, religion, and the demands of the Janissaries all
urged him—Hungary.

That state was particularly ill-prepared to meet attack.
Throughout the turn-of-the-century period Hungary had presented the
curious spectacle of social evolution backward. The great nobles
cased themselves in semi-barbaric luxury and jewels, even wearing
their coronets to bed; the burden of taxation fell ever more
heavily on the peasantry until they staged a fierce revolt,
fiercely repressed in 1514. It was followed by the "Savage Diet,"
which enacted laws that placed the entire laboring population in
actual, not virtual, slavery to "their natural lords," annulled any
charters the towns had, permitted nobles to engage in trade
tax-free, and came down so hard on the minor gentry that thousands
of them preferred to cross the Turkish border, live under Muhammad,
and pay tribute rather than be part of such a regime. King Lajos
himself was often short of clothes and food.

When Suleiman came through Belgrade with 100,000 men, Lajos
could assemble less than 30,000, feudal cavalry, with a group of
forced-to-fight peasant infantry. Lajos had hoped and asked for
help from Charles V, doubly his brother-in-law, but Francis of
France, faithful to his engagement with the Turks, pushed an army
into Italy, and the emperor could spare nothing. Young King Lajos
led against the Turks at Mohacs; on August 28, 1526, he was killed
with both archbishops of the realm, five bishops, and 24,000 men,
and Hungary ceased to exist as a nation. The plunder of Buda
furnished the bazaars of the Near East with wares for years
afterward, and Suleiman had John Zapolya, the voivode of
Transylvania, elected to the vacant throne as a tributary king.

He was not the only claimant. The emperor’s brother Ferdinand
called himself King of Hungary in the right of his wife, sister of
the late King Lajos, and assembled enough of the magnates to make
up something called a Diet, which went through a form of election.
"Tell him I will see him at Mohacs," said Suleiman when he heard of
it, "and if he is not there I will come to Vienna for him."

For the moment the sultan was too busy with affairs in Persia to
do anything about Vienna, and with the withdrawal of Turkish
troops, Hungary collapsed into an anarchy of roving bands who
theoretically held for King Ferdinand or King John, but actually
served only themselves. But by the end of 1528, Suleiman had solved
out his Persian preoccupations and determined that the next step
should be the thorough digestion of Hungary through the fief
system, as the Balkans had been digested earlier. A necessary step
in this direction was the capture of Vienna and the elimination of
any German danger to the new frontier, as the Hungarian danger to
the Balkans had been eliminated by Mohacs and the capture of
Buda.

The strategic plan was to take Vienna in the late summer of
1529, winter there and, drawing in reinforcements, proceed to a
spring campaign for the preliminary conquest of Germany. Francis of
France could be counted on to keep the empire busy on the opposite
flank, the one Charles regarded as vital; Ferdinand, like young
King Lajos, would have to depend pretty much on his own resources.
Suleiman had observed that these Christian kingdoms lacked such
unity of action as was conferred by the combined
sultanate-caliphate.

On April 10, 1529, the sultan left Istanbul with more than
200,000 men. The Janissaries were sent up the Danube in boats; King
John Zapolya would join with a contingent in Hungary.

IV

Ferdinand, in addition to his title of King of Hungary, was also
Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia. As soon as he heard that
Suleiman was on the march, with his ultimate destination the Rhine,
meetings of the estates were called in all the dominions where
Ferdinand had any authority. The leading limitation on all Central
European monarchies of the date was that of weak police power.
Austria voted to sent every tenth man for the defense of Vienna,
but could by no means enforce it, and Bohemia, where the estates
valiantly declared in favor of mobilizing every man capable of
bearing arms, actually sent only 2,000, and these not till late
August. The Diet of the empire, which was assembled at Speyer,
voted an assistance of 12,000 foot and 2,000 horse, but tacked on a
provision that no troops at all were to move until a deputation had
visited Hungary to find out whether this nonsense about a Turkish
drive was really true; then went into a series of almost
interminable debates as to who should command the imperial forces
if it turned out that they were really needed. Charles V was in
Italy, very much concerned about what the French were doing there,
and Pope Clement VII was intensely occupied in reestablishing the
Medici dukedom of Florence in place of the republic.

That is, nobody wished to believe there was any real danger
except the men on the spot. Fortunately for Germany and Europe
there was a couple of very good men on the spot. The better was a
certain Graf Nicolas zu Salm-Reifferscheidt, all his life a solider
of the empire, who had fought at Pavia and personally wounded and
been wounded by King Francis. Salm was already sixty-six at the
time, and in the year of Suleiman’s invasion seventy; a man who had
defended the Croat and Slovene lands against the puppet King
Zapolya and who knew the country. He was too minor a noble to be
named formally as commander; after its endless debate the Diet of
Speyer gave this office to Duke Friedrich of the Palatinate.

Graf Nicolas reached Vienna in the early days of September; not
long after his arrival word came through that Suleiman had taken
Pesth, where the empire had a small garrison, and the Janissaries
had slaughtered every man in the place. If any news were needed to
stir the Viennese to work on their defenses this was probably it;
but down to the coming of Graf Nicolas there had been nobody to
take the lead, to tell people what to do. And there was everything
to do: the city wall dated from approximately the time when Rudolph
of Hapsburg made the place his capital in 1276, was only six feet
thick and ruinous, enclosing the strictly limited area now known as
"the Ring." The outer palisade beyond the dry ditch was so weak
that it bore and deserved the name of "city
hedge"—Stadtzaun; the citadel was an old building of
brick and timber; the houses roofed with highly inflammable
shingles. There were no magazines.

Graf Nicolas sent details out to scout the countryside for every
kind of food, while in and around the city he built and destroyed.
All the houses of the suburbs outside the ancient wall were pulled
down or burned to deprive the attackers of cover, including the
great city hospital, two churches, and three convents. There was no
time to build new masonry walls or to extend the old ones; where
they were weak, earthwork bastions were thrown up and stoutly
palisaded. The bank of the Danube arm that swings past the city was
also trenched and fitted with palisades. To avoid the ricochet of
shot all the paving stones were taken up and most of them used for
a new loose wall inside the old from the Stuben to the Karnthner
Gate—on the east side, along the creek that is called Wiener
Bach, where the old defenses were weakest.

Graf Nicolas conducted a conscientious census, assembling as
many of the useless mouths as he could, women, children, old men
and ecclesiastics, for dispatch outside the city. On 21 September
word came that the Turks were across the river Raab and had taken
the outpost of Altenburg; two days later there arrived in the city
700 first-class Spaniards and about 1,000 German troops of the
empire under the Pfalzgraf Philip, the second of the two good
leaders in the defense. He said that the deputation from the Diet
of Speyer had reported that the Turkish danger was indeed serious,
and Duke Friedrich had come as far forward as Linz with the
imperial contingent but, hearing that Suleiman was in great force,
declined to risk ruin by advancing any further.

That same day there was a skirmish outside the walls between a
body of Turks and 500 cuirassiers under Graf Hardegg; the
cuirassiers were driven in with the loss of seven prisoners, four
of whom were presently sent to Vienna by the sultan, richly
dressed, to bear his terms. He expected to breakfast in the city on
the twenty-ninth; if it would surrender at discretion, none of his
people but functionaries should enter and all would be secure; if
it held out the place would be so utterly destroyed that no one
would know where it had stood, and every living thing in it would
be put to the sword. In view of the general proceedings of the
Turks one could believe that; the word was that the light troops of
their vanguard had come up with a convoy of 5,000 of the useless
mouths at Traismauer and massacred every one of them.

Graf Nicolas had four Turkish prisoners dressed as richly as the
cuirassier messengers and sent them to Suleiman. They bore no word
in return. The garrison numbered 22,000 foot, 2,000 horse, and
seventy-two guns of nearly as many calibers and makes. The cavalry
were stationed in the four main squares to rush wherever they were
needed; a master gunner was assigned to each of the pieces.
Pfalzgraf Philip outranked Salm, but cheerfully waived the fact and
only countersigned his orders. There were nearly 350,000 of the
attackers.

V

That summer it had rained. It rained with an intensity such as
few people in that part of Europe had seen, day after day, one of
the most remarkable meteorological events of the century. Suleiman
would have thought it beneath him to be impeded by the weather, and
in fact he did not allow himself to be. The horsemen who formed the
largest numerical proportion of his army were not, and ahead of the
main body there moved a corps of 20,000 of them, called by the
Turks akinji, or "sackmen," whose specific task was to
devastate the country and destroy the inhabitants in preparation
for Turkish occupation. They were the people who cut off the 5,000
noncombatants at Traismauer, and it is estimated that they got rid
of two thirds of the population of the districts through which they
moved, which cannot be much of an exaggeration.

The horsemen could thus move, no matter how wet it was. The camp
followers, baggage, and women could move after a fashion in wagons,
and it did not matter if they fell behind, because everything they
supplied could be had by ravaging the countryside. The Janissary
infantry and the light guns moved up the Danube in boats. But there
was one force that could not move at all through those perpetual
rains in a country largely wooded and with no metalled roads. That
was the heavy artillery, the siege guns, which weighed all the way
up to twelve tons apiece. Even the Danube flotilla could not carry
such monsters, and they were left behind, to the number of 200.

In view of the number of his troops, the fact that he was joined
at Mohacs by Zapolya, who commanded certain Hungarian loyalties,
and the skill of his engineers, this did not seem particularly
important to Suleiman. He planned on mining operations if Vienna
did not surrender easily, and some thousands of his host were
experienced miners from Wallachia and Moldavia. When he arrived
opposite the city on September 26 and set up seven great camps
around it—tents visible as far as the eye could reach from
the tower of St. Stephen, where Salm established his observation
post—the first thing he did was to command regular parallels
at the southwest side of the city and mining operations against the
Karnthner Gate area on the south side, accompanied by artillery
bombardment and a ceaseless storm of arrows.

It was characteristic of Suleiman the Magnificent that while
these arrows were so numerous that they made the streets near the
walls unsafe, many of them were finished with costly fabrics and
even inlaid with pearls. The Janissaries fired most of them from
the ruins of the suburban houses. The results from the guns
available were notably poor against Salm’s emergency earthworks;
after the first day target was shifted to the taller buildings,
notably St. Stephen’s tower, and it says something about the
quality of Turkish gunnery practice that they could not even drive
Graf Nicolas from his post. The artillery of the defense does not
seem to have been much better in the beginning. Many of the
embrasures in the old walls were so narrow that the guns would not
traverse properly and there was no fund of experience in mounting
pieces behind earthwork bastions. But Salm, or someone under him,
had a highly judgmatical eye; some of the guns were removed to the
tops of buildings, and for others platforms were built, after which
they really began to hurt, especially in the areas along the
river.

This was to have a highly important result, but in the meanwhile
the main event was a cavalry sally from the Karnthner Gate, led by
the Austrian Eck von Reischach on the twenty-ninth, the day
Suleiman proposed to breakfast in Vienna. Von Reischach had spotted
numbers of the Turks spread out among the vineyards on that side,
and killed a lot of them before they could assemble. Through the
next day it was all shooting, and at noon on October 1 the result
of the good artillery practice along the river appeared in the form
of a Turk who came out of the no man’s land created by the guns and
said he was of Christian parents, bearing information.

He was turned over to a cavalry commander, Wilhelm von
Roggendorf, who had him tortured a little to make sure he was
telling the truth, and thus learned that the Turks were driving
mines in an utterly unexpected spot—not where their parallels
were, opposite the Berg, but right under the Wiener Bach, on both
sides of the Karnthner Gate. Countermining was ordered at once;
next morning a big mine under the gate tower was broken into and
destroyed in a strange underground battle by torchlight. General
Roggendorf gave the deserter substance for life; guards were placed
in all the cellars, with drums scattered over with dried peas,
where activity was suspected.

Suleiman’s technique of mining had failed to work by surprise;
but there was no other means of getting into the city, so he turned
to making it work by main force and superior numbers. More mines
were dug in the Karnthner Gate area and all along under the Wiener
Bach. Twice countermines reached the Turkish powder chambers and as
much as eight tons of explosive was carried off from one of them;
three times in the stormy week between October 4 and October 12
mines did go off and made breaches in the walls, one of them wide
enough for twenty-four men abreast. The always victorious
Janissaries assaulted these breaches; but behind them were
palisades, and behind the palisades Spanish arquebusiers and German
Landsknechts with their long swords and huge halberds, quite
as rough citizens as the Janissaries, and better armed for the
conditions. There were 1,200 bodies in the breach on the afternoon
of the twelfth.

Late that night there was a council of war in the Turkish camp.
It was still raining, the food situation in the huge army had
become distinctly serious, since provision convoys could not move.
The losses had not been intolerable in numerical terms—the
figures ran between 14,000 and 20,000—but their incidence was
alarming, most of them falling on the aristocratic horsemen and the
Janissaries. The latter proud troops were depressed and doing
something they had never done before, complaining that their lives
were being sacrificed needlessly. The vizier, Ibrahim, remarked
that the law of the Qu’ran had been satisfied by three main
assaults, each three times renewed. But Suleiman the Magnificent
was not satisfied. Three more great mines, one on each side of the
Karnthner Gate, one directly under the Beg, were just ready, and he
wanted a really grand attack, the whole force of the army,
supported by all its guns. He promised the Janissaries a donative
of 1,000 aspers per man for this attack, with 30,000 aspers and
promotion to the highest military rank for the first man inside the
city.

On the morning of the fourteenth everything was ready. At nine
the order to explode the mines was given and the sacred horsetails
borne forward. The thing miscarried from the start. The mine at the
Berg never went off at all (the Austrians had countermined it and
robbed it of its powder) and though the Kanthner Gate mines made a
breach 130 feet across, the rubble fell outward, and the defense
had a trench inside with new palisades, behind which waited the
same nasty Spaniards and Germans with their long spits. From the
walls the Turkish officers, including the vizier himself, could be
seen trying to drive the men forward with whips and sabers. It was
no use; for the first time in Turkish history an army refused to
advance any farther, almost en masse.

Graf Salm was hit in the hip by the splinters of a stone ball
during the attack, a wound from which he never recovered, but that
night Vienna was kept awake by the light of fires, as the
Janissaries burned everything not portable, and the screams as they
threw their prisoners into the fire. Next morning they were gone.
It snowed.

In the deserted camps the Austrians found some curious-looking
brown beans. They boiled them; the beans themselves were not very
good, but the soup that came from them proved quite potable. It was
the first coffee in Europe.

VI

Various causes add up to the Turkish defeat at Vienna, one of
the main ones undoubtedly Suleiman’s lack of those heavy guns that
had battered holes in besieged places from Constantinople to Rhodes
to Belgrade. The rains deprived him of the guns and also of the
time to take the city without them, and the miners were not a
particularly efficient substitute. They produced gaps in the walls,
but their very operation allowed new defenses to be set up behind
the gaps, and mass attacks were powerless against these defenses.
Yet the breaking of the siege had a positive technical side as well
as a negative; those resolute Spanish arquebusiers and German
Landsknechts were something the Janissaries had not
encountered before; and the West had at last developed a tactical
force that could meet the standing army of the Turkish Empire on
equal terms.

Yet it was the effects rather than the causes that made Vienna
decisive. The unbeatable Janissaries had been beaten, and not only
beaten, but broken in morale. They were only human after all, and
now they knew it. Not only that; a main line of the story lies in
that donative of 1,000 aspers per man to make them undertake an
attack they would normally have urged upon their sultan. Vienna, in
fact, marked the end of the Janissaries as the tribute-children
fanatics founded by Ala ed-Din. They began by taking in their own
children and making it a privilege to be a Janissary with the
disabilities that accompany any hereditary caste, and there was
eventually nothing left of them but the savagery that made them
throw prisoners into the fire.

This development did not reach its peak at once, to be sure. The
Janissaries were to turn into unruly Praetorian guards, who made
and unmade sultans, and this was perhaps inevitable. But even
determinism must admit that Vienna started them down the long
slide. After they had been defeated there and were paid extra for
being defeated, their basic moral broke and they were never the
same. The marvelous Turkish military instrument had a crack in
it.

So did the marvelous Turkish family of the Othmanli sultans.
Suleiman had a son, Mustapha, universally and probably correctly
reported as not inferior in ability to any in the line. He was
reasonably friendly with the vizier, Ibrahim, but after his birth
there was brought to Suleiman the Russian girl known historically
as Roxelana. After the defeat at Vienna she became for Suleiman
something rare in Oriental history, a devouring passion which
nothing could slake. She bore him two sons and a daughter, and it
was elementary that she should want one of her sons to be the heir
of empire. There were two barriers; and in spite of the fact that
Turkish sultans usually kept their private and public lives
separate, the defeat at Vienna made it quite easy for Roxelana to
destroy the major hindrance, Suleiman’s friend, the almost genius,
Ibrahim. He was executed for inefficiency, Roxelana married her
daughter to a man whom she had no difficulty in getting promoted to
the viziership, and started a deliberate campaign against Mustapha.
One afternoon when he called on his father he was met by the seven
mutes with their bowstrings, whom Suleiman watched at their work,
urging them to hurry.

That was the end of the great line. Roxelana’s son Selim became
sultan, but he was correctly known as Selim the Sot, and down to
the time Kemal Ataturk overthrew the remains of the dynasty, the
Othmanli line never produced another able man. For some years the
Turks made faces and horrible noises in Eastern Europe, but
always on a declining scale, always steps going down. They even
worked up to another siege of Vienna in 1683, but it was a matter
of local politics and brought on them the combined forces of
Venice, Poland, Austria, and Russia, and the end of it was that
they lost most of Hungary and all of the Crimea. The real Turkish
danger to Europe was ended for good on the morning of October 14,
1529.

And this was not all that ended. When Martin Luther heard of the
advance of Suleiman against the Hungarians, he declared it was a
visitation fro God in punishment for the sins of the Pope and his
bishops; but after Suleiman started for the Rhine by way of Vienna,
he rapidly changed stance and declared it the duty of every
Christian to oppose the Turk. This had a double effect; for Charles
the Emperor, already involved in a two-front war against France in
Italy and the Netherlands, could not neglect the help of the north
German Protestants. He therefore tolerated internal religious
disorder for the sake of keeping out the external, and not a few of
the stern halberdiers of Vienna were Lutherans. By the time Charles
was ready to turn against the Protestants, they were too solidly
established for even an emperor to cut them down.

8. LEYDEN AND THE FOUNDATION
OF SEA POWER

I

"We may regard the Prince as a dead man; he has neither
influence nor credit." Thus wrote Fernando Alvarez de Toledo,
Duke of Alva, to his master, King Philip II of Spain and the
Netherlands, Emperor of America and the Indies. The date was 1568
and the prince referred to was William of Orange, called "the
Silent" because, although he talked a great deal, he so seldom said
the wrong thing.

There was some justification for Alva’s statement; he had been
captain-general in the Netherlands for barely a year, but already
those turbulent estates were well in hand, their revolt was over.
Of the great Catholic nobles who led it, Hoogstraeten had died of a
wound, Egmont and Hoorn had lost their heads on the scaffold. Only
Orange was left, and he was wandering from place to place, pursued
by creditors, while his lived lived as she pleased in Cologne and
pleased to live in a fashion referred to as "irregular." "We may
regard the Prince as a dead man"; the army he had gathered by
selling everything he owned had dissolved at a touch from Alva and
in a manner that brought an imputation of personal cowardice on
Orange himself.

Nor was it likely that any other army Orange could raise would
have better luck. The best he could get were mercenaries, Walloon
and German Landsknechts, fairly good man, but lacking in
cohesion, while Alva led the "invincible terciaries" of Spain,
infantry such as the world had hardly seen since Roman days. They
had training and morale, a consciousness that nothing could break
or shake them; they had proved it a hundred times under every
conceivable battle condition. Alva gave them iron discipline;
saving always the right of sack when a town was taken, they
behaved. When his army marched from Italy to the uneasy
Netherlands, even the 2,000 prostitutes who came with it were
organized in battalions and companies and under military
command.

There was something of the iron, of the perpetual struggle
against adversaries who could only be overcome by crusade, in
everything Alva said or did. "I have tamed men of iron in my day,"
he remarked on taking up the mission to Brussels. "I shall know how
to deal with these men of butter." He began that dealing by
placing a garrison of the metallic terciaries in every town that
had any importance; he prosecuted it by setting up a trial court,
or "Council of Troubles," which soon and more accurately became
known as the "Council of Blood," for its verdict was always guilty
and the sentence always death. Nobody knows how many thousands
besides Egmont and Hoorn passed through its hands to stake, sword,
or gibbet during the year before Alva decided to regard the prince
as a dead man. On Ash Wednesday morning alone, when people would be
found in their beds after the carnival, 1,500 were taken. "I have
ordered them all to be executed," wrote Alva.

Basically he was acting as agent of the perpetual crusade, as
the right arm of Philip of Spain, who had publicly prayed never to
be allowed to be called king over those who rejected God (as
recognized by the Catholic confession) as their Lord, and who had
said he would sacrifice 100,00 lives rather. But there was also a
constitutional question involved, and Alva was acute enough to
perceive that he could never extirpate the Protestant heresy
without first getting rid of those councils which, all through the
Netherlands, had cognizance of juridical and financial matters
under a complex system of charters, grants, and privileges, one for
each town or province. In the eyes of the perpetual crusaders these
councils had failed to do their plain duty. They had not put down
heresy; they had winked at Calvinist conventicles openly held; they
visited no punishment on the vandals who sacked and plundered
churches during the great wave of iconoclasm in 1566.

It was therefore upon the great Catholic nobles who maintained
the integrity of the charters that Alva first bore down, then on
the minor clergy, who resented their revenues being taken away for
new bishops from Spain, and finally upon the magistrates of the big
cities, Catholic every man. Of course, Protestants stood
automatically condemned; but the main first movement, the necessary
step, was to get rid of local authority, or rather to place above
it an authority that would enforce obedience to orders from
Spain.

This Alva had achieved. Egmont, Hoorn, Hoogstraeten were dead
and their estates forfeit; Orange could be regarded as dead and his
estates were also forfeit so far as they lay within Philip’s
dominion. To a disposition to resistance there had succeeded such
utter apathy that hardly a man joined Prince William when he
brought his mercenaries over the French border. The Inquisition was
proceeding famously with its job of eliminating heretics when there
occurred a key event. The pay chest for Alva’s terciaries, 450,000
ducats, was aboard five ships forced by a gale to put into
Plymouth, and Elizabeth of England, that untrustworthy woman who so
seldom neglected any opportunity to lay her hands on money, seized
both vessels and cash.

Trying to get the money back was a matter for diplomacy, but
even if diplomacy succeeded far better than it usually did in
extracting ducats from Elizabeth, the process would take time and
the emergency was immediate. The invincible terciaries were deeply
in arrears for their pay, they were grumbling about it, and they
possessed a monopoly of military force within the Netherlands. If
they chose to take what they wanted, there was no power that could
stop them, and it would not be the first time that unpaid Spanish
soldiers had done their own collecting. In thoroughly well-founded
apprehension, Alva summoned the States-General of the realm to
Brussels in March 1569 and told them they would have to pay taxes
to support the soldiers who were protecting them. He proposed a
special 1 percent tax on all real property, once only; a 5 percent
tax on real estate transfers; and a 10 percent sales tax. He
explained to the estates that this was the system of the
alcabala, which worked very well in Spain.

Perhaps, but the Netherlands was a closely populated commercial
area, and the real estate and sales taxes simply meant ruin. The
States-General refused them; Alva got part of his 1 percent tax and
that was all. Utrecht refused to pay even this; Alva quartered a
regiment there, then declared the city and province guilty of high
treason, its charters, privileges, and property confiscated to the
crown. Even the Catholic bishops and two members of Alva’s Council
of Blood joined the protest, and a seep of discontent went through
the country like underground water, only waiting for a puncture to
bring it to the surface.

II

At this point Alva discovered that William of Orange was not
quite as dead as he thought. Back in ’66, before the outbreak of
the iconoclasts, a not inconsiderable number of the lesser nobility
held a meeting in Brussels to protest against the vigor with which
the Inquisition was putting down heresy, and submitted a "Request"
to the then regent for mitigation. They heard themselves described
as "beggars," and adjourned to a hotel, where, with the
accompaniment of a good deal of drinking, they enthusiastically
accepted the name, adopted the beggar’s staff, wallet, and bowl as
their emblem, and formed an association in support of the
privileges of the Netherlands. One of the charges that sent Egmont
and Hoorn to the block was that they had looked in while this
festive scene was taking place, though they had retired with
cluckings of disapproval.

Alva’s repressive measures made it dangerous to wear that beggar
badge, and the movement seemed reasonably well beaten down when the
tax dispute arose. William the Silent was perfectly well aware of
the state of feeling engendered by that row. One of the things that
helped him stay alive was that he ran an extremely good
intelligence service, with spies even in the cabinet of Madrid, who
tipped him off every time a new assassin was dispatched. Now, in
his capacity as a sovereign prince, he issued letters of marque to
eighteen ships. His brother, Louis of Nassau, saw to it that the
ships were actually equipped at the Huguenot port of La Rochelle in
France, and that they put to sea. They became the "Sea Beggars,"
and their business was plundering and killing Catholics.

By the end of 1569 eighty-four ships were in commission, and
they had taken 300; no church or convent along the shore was safe
from them. William of Orange tried to keep them in bounds by
drawing regulations and appointing an admiral, but he might as well
have tried to restrain a rhinoceros. The main leaders of the Sea
Beggars were William of Blois, Lord of Treslong, and William de la
Marck, a descendant of the famous "Wild Boar of the Ardennes," who
was very like his ancestor. Nothing that happened on the Spanish
Main went beyond the doings of the Sea Beggars. They were under no
civil control and animated by fierce hatreds. Many of them had lost
ears or a nose to the executioners of the Inquisition or had been
otherwise mutilated, and now was the chance to pay it all out.
Priests, nuns, and Catholic magistrates they usually tortured to
death, letting everyone know that it stood to the account of
Alva.

What the Duke of Alva thought of this is not a matter of record.
He had no experience or knowledge of sea power—nobody did at
that date—and no naval service. He probably regarded the Sea
Beggars as banditti, who could in time be exorcised by the method
normal for dealing with such gentry on land: that is, cutting their
bases of operation from under them. In this case it took diplomatic
action. Queen Elizabeth of England, as might be expected, was
allowing the Beggars to use her harbors for victualing and the
disposal of plunder, but she was unwilling to push Philip of Spain
too far at this particular time, and when protests from Madrid
became really stiff, she stopped procrastinating and issued a
proclamation closing her harbors to the sea robbers.

This was early in 1572. The German ports were at some distance
and not very good markets, and it is likely that discussions in the
Beggar fleet about what to do were still going on when an
unseasonable westerly gale blew up on April 1 and drove
twenty-eight Beggar ships under Treslong into the estuary of the
Scheldt. They anchored off Brill on the island of Walcheren, and
the word from the town was that its Spanish garrison had gone to
Utrecht to help enforce the edict of high treason.

Treslong instantly conceived the idea of taking the town; the
Beggars set fire to the north gate and beat it in with the stump of
a mast. They treated the Catholic churches and religious houses as
usual, but the people well, and were about to leave when it
occurred to Treslong that here was the answer to the base problem.
Instead of pulling out he landed some guns and raised the flag of
the Prince of Orange.

The news of this mad exploit produced a chain reaction. Jean de
Henin-Lietard, Comte Bossu, the governor of Holland province, came
down with a strong force to repossess the place. There were not
over 300 of the Beggars in Brill, but the townspeople helped in the
defense, someone cut a sluice gate and flooded the Spaniards onto a
dike, where the ships cannonaded them. Most of the boats in which
they came were taken. Bossu just barely got away; his force was
practically wiped out.

When Orange heard of it, he was inclined to treat the whole
episode as just one more caprice of the ungovernable Sea Beggars.
But the water table had been breached; it stood demonstrated that
there was one thing against which the terciaries were not
invincible—water. Flushing rose against its garrison, the Sea
Beggars sent help, and Alva’s chief engineer, hastily rushed in to
strengthen the citadel, was hanged from its gate. All Walcheren
island except Middelburg fell into the hands of the revolters, and
from Walcheren the movement spread to the mainland. Everywhere in
Zeeland, Holland, Gelderland, Overyssel, Utrecht, and Friesland the
Orange flag was hoisted; in these provinces only Amsterdam and a
few minor places failed to kill their garrisons and were held for
the king. At this precise moment Louis of Nassau succeeded in
raising an army in France, which pushed in to take Mons, and the
revolters received the spiritual lift of one of the great war songs
of history, "Wilhelmus van Nassouwen," still the Dutch national
anthem. On the wave of excitement money contributions flowed in
that enabled Prince William to raise an army of mercenaries and
march over the German border.

Any popular revolt carries things with a dash in the beginning,
but unless the upper authority is quite swept away, as in the
French Revolution, this period is succeeded by one in which the
contending parties shake down to the forces that will actually be
employed during the struggle. In the Netherlands revolt Alva lost
only a comparatively small number of men from his garrisons, and
was by no means swept away. After the first rush the
counterrevolutionary elements in the situation began to become
manifest. One of them remained in the background, but helped to
determine the character of the struggle from that point; the rising
was economic as well as religious, and what the burghers wanted was
to be let alone in the conduct of their commercial affairs. They
did not rush to join the standard and were not very anxious to
contribute money; they simply wanted to get rid of the Spanish
system of taxation.

Another of the pro-Spanish factors was fortuitous; the Massacre
of St. Bartholemew in France took place soon after Louis of Nassau
threw himself into Mons, and it cut from under him the support of
the French Huguenots, who had planned to join him with 12,000 men.
Alva instantly saw and seized the strategic occasion by drawing
troops from everywhere to besiege the place.

A third influence was supplied by William of Orange’s men. He
began a war of sieges and actually took several
towns—Roermond, Tirlemont, Malines, Oudenarde—but in
every one his German Protestant mercenaries sacked churches and
maltreated churchmen, in spite of the prince’s efforts to enforce
religious toleration. The southern Netherlands, where he was
operating, had grave economic and political complaints against
Spanish rule, but they remained predominantly Catholic, and forced
conversion was no more acceptable to one side than to the other.
William found himself treated as an enemy; Louvain closed its
gates, and he could make no impression on Brussels, where the
citizens joined the small garrison in defense against him. That is,
the Low Countries were beginning their ultimate fission along the
line of language and religion.

Nevertheless, William pressed on toward the relief of Mons.
Alva, with an army that could have destroyed him in battle, made no
attempt to fight. He had a lively appreciation of the structural
weakness of a mercenary force, which lay in the financial
department, and no intention of wasting his manpower resources to
achieve a breakup that should come about through natural causes.
However, he did help the natural causes along. On the night of
September 11, 1572, Orange encamped at the village of Harmignies, a
league from Mons. During the dark hours 600 Spanish soldiers under
Julian Romero slipped into his camp with white shirts over their
armor for identification, and just barely missed taking the prince
himself while killing 800 of his men.

The natural causes took effect at once. The army went to pieces,
Orange was tagged as a timid and incompetent general, who had not
even set guards to provide for his own safety. Louis in Mons
surrendered six days later and the war entered a new phase.

III

Instead of sieges by the Orange party it became an affair of
Spanish sieges of towns held for Orange. Alva organized two
columns, one under his natural son, Don Frederic of Toledo, for the
province of Holland, the other under General Mondragon for Zeeland.
The Mondragon command performed some extraordinary feats, such as
assaulting the island of South Beveland by crossing a channel at
ebb tide, with water up to the soldiers’’ breasts, but its
operations were off the main line. The decisive command was that of
Frederic of Toledo. He took Malines first and, as it was the most
important town that had surrendered to Orange, made an example by
giving it up to his soldiers for a three-day sack, in which no
distinction was made between Catholic and Protestant; all equally
raped, robbed, or slaughtered. Zutphen came next; as it was largely
Protestant, there was more killing than at Malines. At Naarden the
destruction was systematic; the women were publicly raped, then
every living thing was put to the sword, just as Suleiman had
promised at Vienna.

Don Frederic now pushed through to Amsterdam and, basing there,
advanced against Haarlem at the beginning of December 1572. The
place was of both symbolic and intrinsic importance, a hotbed of
Calvinism and one of the largest cities in the Netherlands. It was
also one of the weakest; the garrison of 4,000 was nowhere near
enough for the wide circuit of its half-ruinous walls, and Toledo
had 30,000 men, Spaniards, Walloons, and Germans. He expected to
take the place by assault, and after a bombardment tried it; but
Haarlem had heard of Zutphen and Naarden, the burghers joined in
the defense, and in fierce fighting the assault was beaten off with
heavy loss.

This caused Don Frederic to take stock. On the east the town was
protected by a sheet of shallow water, and not approachable; on the
north by the estuary of the Y, an arm of the Zuyder Zee, with
outlying forts on the estuary; only on the west and south was solid
ground. Across this ground Don Frederic began a formal siege
approach, and all winter long there were mining and countermining,
cannon battering the walls and citizens repairing them by night.
The burghers made frequent and violent sallies, cut off the heads
of the men they captured and rolled them into the Spanish lines in
barrels; the Spaniards hanged their prisoners on gibbets; and the
townspeople parodied Catholic religious services in indecent
processions along the walls. Toledo tried another assault on
January 31; this also was beaten, and he wanted to give up, but
Alva threatened to disown him if he did. The siege ran down to a
blockade.

The Spanish difficulty was that the blockade could not be made
complete. All winter long skaters carried provisions across the
frozen lake, and with the coming of spring their place was taken by
shallow-draft boats. Don Frederic solved this by setting up a fleet
of curiously made ships on the Y under Count Bossu, and on May 28,
Bossu engaged and utterly defeated the Dutch inland ships. After
this it became merely a question of time. When shoe leather, rats,
and weeds had been eaten, Haarlem surrendered on July 11. Don
Frederic executed every man of the garrison and the 400 most
prominent citizens, but was gracious enough to spare the rest of
the town in return for all the money in it.

The cause of the revolt was now in reasonably bad shape. During
the siege William of Orange made frantic efforts to get together
and three times managed to send forces of three or four thousand
men under various commanders for a relief. They were always cut to
pieces; the terciaries were still invincible in the field, and free
to go on besieging until the Netherlanders ran out of towns.
William’s efforts to persuade Elizabeth of England to assume a
protectorate over the provinces came to nothing, and he was always
faced by a grinding shortage of money.

As in any contest, the difficulties were not all on one side.
Alva had spent 25 million florins sent from Spain, besides the 5
million he got out of the 1 percent tax, and his treasury was
empty. Don Frederic had lost 12,000 men at Haarlem, whom it would
be onerous and expensive to replace. The duke wrote to the king
that the only way to suppress this heresy was to burn every
Protestant town to the ground and kill everyone in it, and in
August he sent Don Frederic to Alkmaar with 16,000 men to make a
beginning on this new policy.

Toledo failed. Alkmaar had only 2,000 burghers, but they beat
off an assault and, after a seven-week siege, opened the dikes,
with a slogan from Prince William: "Better to ruin the land than to
lose the land." The water rose around the Spanish camp, an
event not necessarily fatal in itself, but which turned into defeat
when Count Bossu attempted to bring the Spanish inland fleet up
from the Y. It was met in the Zuyder Zee by the Beggars under
Admiral Dirkzoon and utterly destroyed, Bossu himself being taken
prisoner, and the investment could not be maintained through the
waters.

That finished Alva. He asked to be relieved, and at the end of
1573 there arrived to replace him the Grand Commander, Don Luis
Requesens. He brought a less savage policy, with some effort at
conciliation, but the utmost Philip of Spain would concede was that
heretics should have time to sell their property before leaving the
country, and the least William of Orange would accept was full
freedom of worship; the war went on. Strategically there was no
change. Requesens continued Alva’s policy of working south through
the Holland towns to crack the coastal provinces against the anvil
of Flanders. He built a fleet at Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom to
clear the Sea Beggars from the Scheldt, and sent an army of 8,000
under General Valdez to besiege Leyden. The Hague was already
Spanish, and the coast down to the mouth of the New Meuse;
possession of Leyden would cut the whole of Holland province from
the sea.

The Spanish fleet, commanded by the same Julian Romero who
almost caught William at Harmignies, found the Beggars off
Walcheren, now led by Louis de Boisot, Sieur de Ruart. (William de
la Marck had been dismissed for torturing a seventy-two-year-old
priest who was a friend of Orange, and a couple of years later met
a singularly appropriate death as the result of being bitten by a
mad dog.) The battle ended as Spanish attempts to deal with
the Sea Beggars usually did, in total defeat. Romero got out of a
porthole of his burning flagship and, swimming to the bank where
Requesens was watching, climbed out of the water and said, "I told
Your Excellency that I was a land fighter, not a sailor." In
exchange the Spaniards fell on Louis of Nassau, who had crossed the
Rhine with one of the usual ragtag armies of mercenaries and
volunteers, and wiped it out with hardly any loss to themselves,
Louis being killed in the process.

The minor pieces had now been swept from the board. William was
between Delft and Rotterdam with some 6,000 men, certainly not
enough to meet the Spaniards in the field or to raise a siege of
Leyden, and if the Spaniards took Leyden, they could take
anything.

IV

Valdez originally approached the place in October 1573, but
after some rather desultory operations, in which he does seem even
to have established a complete blockade, he had to be recalled
because of a mutiny in Antwerp. His second approach was on May 26,
1574, and this time he was thoroughly clear on plan and technique.
Leyden lay at the heart of a concentric ring of dikes, with
occasional villages along them. These villages Valdez fortified,
and where there was no town at the right strategic point, a redoubt
was built, making a total of sixty-two strong points in all,
mutually supporting. The Spaniard intended to avoid the expensive
assaults, battering and mining operations Don Frederic had used at
Haarlem and Alkmaar, and let hunger work for him through a pure but
very tight blockade. He seems to have been aware that the lazy
Netherlanders, deep in their own affairs, had failed to reprovision
the place after his first approach, or to strengthen its
garrison.

Just before the ring closed, Orange got through a letter telling
the townspeople that if they could hold out for three months it
would be enough, they would be relieved. But the days passed and
the weeks passed; Orange fell ill of a tertian fever, he had no
money, and there was no hope of raising an army to break the Valdez
ring. The estates of the realm were summoned, and authorized the
prince to take the desperate measure of cutting the great dikes
along the Meuse and Yssel at Rotterdam, Schiedam, Delfshaven,
submerging half of Holland. On August 21 the townspeople got out a
message saying they had made good the three months asked; bread was
now all gone and malt cake would last only four days more.

Be of good cheer, said the reply from Orange, flown in by
carrier pigeon, the water is coming. Burgomaster Van der Werff read
the missive from the steps of the town hall and sent musicians
through the streets playing "Wilhelmus van Nassouwen." In the
Spanish camp there was anxiety, but the "Glippers," as the Medizing
Netherlanders were called, told Valdez not to worry, this was not
Alkmaar, protected by a single dike system; here the tiers of dikes
were so extensive, one behind another, that there was no chance the
besiegers would be drowned out. So it proved; the waters spread
inland, but the ruined land was a useless sacrifice, there were
only ten inches of sea, the redoubts and fortified villages were
still dry. On August 27, Leyden got through another desperate
appeal to the estates; the town was eating horses and dogs, all
cereal had vanished.

Orange’s body was so ill that his life was despaired of, but the
affliction had not attacked his brain, and as soon as he got the
authorization to cut the dikes, he had determined to make use of
the one force in which the Netherlanders had a clear
superiority—the sea arm. On September 1, Admiral Boisot and
the Sea Beggars arrived at Rotterdam with 200 shallow-draft ships,
most of them specially-built, carrying about ten light guns apiece
and ten to eighteen oars. They included experimental craft like the
huge Ark of Delft, with shotproof bulwarks and paddle wheels
on hand-operated cranks.

With this fleet the Beggars floated through to a huge dike
called the Land Schieding, Shield of the Land, five miles
from Leyden. On Orange’s orders Boisot waited till it fell dark on
the night of September 10, then warped in and seized a section of
the dike. The Spaniards attempted a counterattack from the villages
flanked the seized section, but the guns of the ships were too much
for them; the dike was cut and Boisot’s squadron floated
through.

Three quarters of a mile father was another dike, the Greenway,
still a foot above water. Once more Boisot worked the game of a
night surprise; once more the dike was cut and the ships passed.
But now came a check; beyond the Greenway lay an extensive march,
the Freshwater Lake, into which the tide spread without rising high
enough to float the fleet. A canal led through this marsh, but the
Spaniards had fortified both ends; the ships could approach the
barrier only one at a time, end on, and so could make no use of
their superior artillery. For nearly a week the fleet milled about
confusedly, doubtless with tempers growing short; then on September
18 a northwest gale blew up to increase the depth of the water, and
simultaneously there appeared some refugees who said there was a
low dike between the villages of Zoetermeer and Benthuysen by
cutting which the lake could be avoided. Boisot made for it; both
villages had been fortified, but the ships carried too many guns,
the Spaniards were driven out after a sharp little fight, and the
fleet pushed on. Boisot had the houses fired as a signal to Leyden
that help was coming.

But was it? Beyond the burning villages stood the strong
point of Zoeterwoude, a mile and a quarter from Leyden, heavily
fortified, well above the floods, and the wind held steadily and
seasonably to light airs from the east, keeping the waterlevel in
the operating area at no more than nine inches, while Boisot’s
ships needed twenty. Even the presence of William of Orange, who
had himself brought to the spearhead of the advance on a litter,
could not help. Within the town nearly the last edible morsel was
gone; people were dying of starvation, and a crowd swarmed around
Burgomaster Van der Werff, begging him to surrender and take a
chance on what the Spaniards would do to them. "Here is my sword,"
he cried. "If you will, plunge it into my heart and divide my flesh
among you to appease your hunger; but expect no surrender as long
as I am alive."

Orange went back to Rotterdam, and the sun rose and set; but on
the morning of October 1 a gale rose from the northwest, as
unreasonable as Jeanne d’Arc’s wind. It switched to southwest, the
whole North Sea came piling through the broken dikes, and in a
matter of hours Boisot had more than two feet of water. The ships
moved to the storm of Zoeterwoude, there was a singular amphibious
battle against Spanish picket boats afloat in the dark among
treetops and houses and Spanish terciaries on the causeways and
patches of emergent ground. The Beggars were the better men at this
kind of game; the Spanish ships were all sunk, their men were
driven down the causeways by Zeeland fishermen, using gun, harpoon,
and pike, and Boisot was through.

But not yet in Leyden. Only 300 yards from the walls were the
two strongest fortifications yet, Lammen and Leyderdorp, heavily
armed, one of them holding Valdez himself. Boisot moved up toward
Lammen, just out of gun range, and spent a day looking it over. The
appearance was very formidable indeed; he held off till dark and
called a council of his captains.

It was a night full of apocalyptic events, and it is unlikely
that anyone slept much. There was some firing through it, where
ships approached the Leyderdorp on the Dutch right. Toward midnight
a terrible crash of unexplained origin came from the direction of
the town; then a long series of lights visible from Lammen, the
Spaniards engaged in some mysterious activity. But at daybreak a
figure was seen wildly gesticulating from the top of Lammen fort;
when a ship pulled in, it was a Netherlander, and the fort had been
abandoned during the night. The crash had been a section of wall
falling, undermined by the waters, and Valdez had left, fearing a
sally combined with an attack from the outside, which he lacked the
strength to sustain in this curious wet war.

Leyden was relieved. Boisot’s ships pulled in and began tossing
out bread on all sides to the famished inhabitants. William of
Orange offered them a remission of taxes for their heroic
endurance, but they said they would rather have a university, and
one of the greatest institutions of learning in Europe came into
being.

V

The relief was doubly, trebly, quadruply decisive. It was
decisive because the jealous States-General said it was: they held
a meeting and conferred on William of Orange "absolute power,
authority and sovereign command in all concerns of the common land
without exception." Henceforth he was no longer a free-lance,
helping out as best he could, but stadtholder of the realm. It is
true that he and his successors were often hampered by those same
States-General; but the new nation had been given a central
executive, which could coordinate its activities as never before. A
united effort became possible, and united effort was made.

Secondly, while Haarlem had cost the Spaniards 12,000 nearly
irreplaceable men, Leyden was nearly as expensive, and they had
failed to take the town. As a result, no more great sieges were
attempted; the war slid down to minor enterprises and battlings.
Neither Requesens nor his successors could get enough money to pay
their troops, there were mutinies and a series of confused events
lasting for years, but the independence of Holland was
substantially achieved when Boisot sailed past Fort Lammen.

It was also decisive for its effect on the Spanish command; for
there had been brought into combination something new in the
world’s history, something realized at the time rather than
comprehended, but acted upon in realization—the influence of
sea power. There was nothing in the Spanish system fitted to deal
with the Sea Beggars. "I am a land fighter, not a sailor"; the
Spaniards never did succeed in finding the latter, and it was to be
the ruin of that vast empire whose roots went down to Las Navas de
Tolosa. The invocation of sea power at Leyden was more or less
accidental on the part of William of Orange: it was the only weapon
he had left on the wall. But it was effective and it demonstrated
that a city on the water could always be supported from the water.
This was one of the reasons why there were no more great
sieges.

And much more. The relief of Leyden made it certain that the
Catholic reaction would not submerge northwest Europe as it had
Bohemia and Poland; that the liberty of conscience, for which
William of Orange so earnestly strove, would not be wiped out, at
least from this one little corner. That certitude is usually
referred to the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the
English-speaking peoples have taken a justifiable pride in the
events of the summer of 1588. But the fighting against the Armada
was not only the crowning event in a series; it also contained an
element too easily and too often overlooked. When the Duke of
Medina Sidonia sailed for the English Channel, his mission was not
direct attack on England; it was to clear the way for that most
astute of the governors of the Spanish Netherlands, Alexander
Farnese, Prince of Parma, who was to cross the Channel at the head
of 25,000 men. They were Spanish veterans, and it is not likely
that the English levies could have made out any better against them
in the field than the successive mercenary armies of Orange and his
brothers did.

But Parma never made it, and his failure was not entirely due to
the defeat of the Armada. Even in defeat, even before he was
defeated, Medina Sidonia had done his part in the combined
operation. Every English ship that would bear guns was concentrated
in the western mouth of the Channel when the Armada put into
Calais, and the duke wrote from there to Parma, urging him to
hurry, to cross while there was nothing to oppose his crossing.
Parma had his transports ready and his troops; he even had an
elaborate equipment of flat-bottomed landing craft.

But he did not move; and the reason he did not move was that
there lay in the mouth of the Scheldt the Dutch squadron of
Justinian of Nassau, William’s natural son. He sat there; and the
Spanish reflected that they were land fighters, not sailors. "The
shippes of Holland and Zeeland stood continually in their sight,
threatening shot and powder and many inconveniences; for fear of
which shippes the Mariners and sea-men secretly withdrew themselves
both day and night, lest the Duke of Parma his soldiers should
compell them by maine force to goe on board."

So in the chain of causation Queen Elizabeth builded better than
she knew when she seized Alva’s pay chest and forced him to lay the
taxes that provoked the rise of the Dutch republic. For it was
those high-pooped, ungainly little ships, rocking gently on the
sluggish waves of the Scheldt, the ships that had become a national
navy when Leyden was relieved, that kept Parma where he was and
rendered the operation against England futile. It was a singularly
rich reward for stealing someone’s money.

9.
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS AND THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES

I

Ten years after the siege of Vienna, in 1539, one Ignatius
Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit Order. From the
beginning it was conceived of as an army; its head was a general,
its training course long, rigorous, and carried out with military
precision. Discipline was strict and absolute obedience was
demanded. "Let us all think alike and talk in the same manner if
possible," the founder once said. The order was as much of a
celibate military community within the body politic as the
Janissaries, and like them, its purpose was militant, for Loyola
conceived that the Church was at war—against those enemies of
true religion, the Protestants of the North. The Jesuits produced
no great men to speak of, but they did produce the devoted
formations which conducted the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Unity of doctrine, action, and purpose made them a most
conspicuous success, especially in view of the fact that the
Protestants were splintering into all sorts of
sects—Lutherans, Calvinists, Bohemian Brothers, Church of
England, Anabaptists—some of which went off into pedantry and
some into witch burning. Sometime early in the 1580s, while William
the Silent was being assassinated and Philip II was building up to
that quarrel with Elizabeth of England that issued in the Armada
fighting, a group of these Jesuits got hold of a young son of a
cadet branch of the house of Hapsburg, a boy named Ferdinand. They
brought him up in the right way. There is no sign that they tried
to make a Jesuit of him—after all, his destiny was royal and
not ecclesiastical—but they trained him so thoroughly that
all the rest of his life he behaved as though he were in fact a
Jesuit, as though his first and almost his only duty was the
service of the Church. In 1590, when he was twelve, his father
died, and he became Duke of Styria, which is the southern part of
Austria. Six years later he finished his education, made a trip to
Rome, and on his return assumed personal control of the
province.

The Steiermark was a border country, subject to incursions of
Turks; Duke Ferdinand considered keeping them out nowhere near as
important as getting rid of the Protestants, who had made
considerable headway in the area. One decree prohibited any form of
Protestant worship, another offered everyone in Styria a reasonable
choice—recant and conform or leave the country. There had
been similar instruments of government in various jurisdictions
before; the difference this time was that it was enforced with the
utmost Jesuit rigor. Nearly one third of the population was driven
over the frontiers, and by the twentieth century Styria was still
over 98 percent Catholic. Ferdinand’s local Counter-Reformation was
a success.

At this point something unusual occurred in the dynastic history
of the Hapsburgs. None of the sons of the Emperor Maximilian II had
any children, and Ferdinand of Styria, the pet of the Jesuits,
emerged as the heir apparent of the whole Hapsburg heritage, except
for Spain and the Netherlands. This was not particularly pleasant
for the Protestants, and the friction point appeared in Bohemia.
Like most of the East European states, it was at least
theoretically an elective monarchy; and in 1617, when Emperor
Matthias, the last of Maximilian’s childless sons, was obviously
not going to live much longer, the Bohemian estates were persuaded
to name Ferdinand of Styria as king-designate.

The Emperor Matthias was principally interested in establishing
his personal power and concerned himself very little with religious
matters. His predecessor, Rudolph II, had been a gloomy man,
chiefly interested in art, who had issued a "Letter of Majesty,"
giving the Protestants full religious toleration. It stood up; in
1617, at the time of Ferdinand’s election, there were more
Protestants than Catholics in Bohemia. But now things changed at
once; the Jesuits were in control. Peasants who refused to profess
Catholicism were driven into exile; the town councils were packed
with Catholics, and in at least two places Protestant churches were
physically pulled down.

The opposition was at least partly political and dynastic. The
whole history of the German lands from the time of Charles the
Great is one of efforts on the part of various
houses—Wittelsbach, Wettin, Zahringen, Hohenzollern, or toll
off any number you please—to establish themselves
independently, which subtended resistance to the supremacy of the
house of Austria. At this date Hohenzollern was still
insignificant, Wettin was in the hands of one of its weakest
members and Wittelsbach in those of Maximilian II of Bavaria (not
to be confounded with Maximilian II, the emperor), who, like
Ferdinand, was a child of the Jesuits, and heartily willing to
second his religious projects. In accordance with the thought of
the period, the Bohemian Protestants needed a titular head, a royal
personage, and they chose Friedrich of the Simmern line, Elector
Palatine and husband of Princess Elizabeth of England, which should
assure some financial help from that quarter. (It is interesting to
note how deeply and over how many years Continental politics have
been influenced by the hope or actuality of financial help from
England.)

On May 23, 1618, the Protestant estates of Bohemia met in the
Hradcany Palace at Prague, denounced the Catholic board of regents
that had been running the country in Matthias’ name, threw two of
them out the window, and set up a provisional government under
thirty "directors." This was the "Defenestration of Prague," and it
was the real beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. Count Matthias
Thurn, the Protestant leader, recognized that he had committed an
act of rebellion and at once began to raise troops but, having few
financial resources of his own and none being forthcoming from
England, got very few men. Ferdinand’s forces crossed the Bohemian
border that fall and began burning villages, but there was no
serious fighting until March 1619, when, the Emperor Matthias
having decided to die in a fit, the full Estates of Bohemia met,
declared Ferdinand deposed, and elected Friedrich as their
king.

II

The news of this proceeding reached Frankfurt am Main just as
the election was being held to determine a new emperor in
succession to Matthias. In the Holy Roman Empire there were seven
voters for the crown. Three of them were the bishops of Mainz,
Koln, and Treves, and these were safely Catholic; three were
Protestant, the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony and the Elector
Palatine, while the seventh was the Bohemian vote. Thus if
Ferdinand were not King of Bohemia, he could not be emperor. It was
absolutely necessary for him to conquer Bohemia, and he had little
money and hardly any troops. His fellow Jesuit, Maximilian of
Bavaria, offered to help him out with both for a price, the same
being the transfer of the lucrative Palatinate electorate to
Bavaria. The ministers of Philip III of Spain, who had no brains to
act for himself, sent money and a Spanish army from the
Netherlands, in view of the fact that this was a matter of the
faith and they had joined Ferdinand in a Catholic League.

It took time to get these forces moving and they did not cross
the Bohemian border until July 1620. This march was important; it
brought to the center of the stage Johann Tzerclaes Tilly, then
sixty-one, a professional soldier from Brabant, who had begun as a
simple pikeman and fought his way up to command against the Turks,
the French, and anyone else who wanted fighting. He was a past
master of the Spanish system of war; of handling those steady
blocks of pikemen with musketeers in their corners, guns planted
carefully across the front, and cavalry in the wings—the
armies that had marched from one end of Europe to the other. In
1610 he entered the service of Maximilian of Bavaria; Maximilian
made him general of the Catholic League for the invasion of
Bohemia, and on November 8, 1620, he and his troops came up with
the Protestants at the White Hill, near Prague.

No details need be supplied. The Protestant army, composed of
post-feudal levies, could not stand for a moment against the iron
tercias of Spain, and was utterly destroyed. At the same
time Ambrose Spinola, with the troops from the Spanish Netherlands,
overran most of the Palatinate, and Friedrich gained the title of
"the Winter King," for the one season he had been allowed in
Prague.

This double disaster broke up the Evangelical Union of
Protestant Princes, which had been formed to face the Catholic
League. Ferdinand proceeded to settle matters in accordance with
his state principle of: "Better to rule over a desert than a
country full of heretics." The Palatine electorate was
transferred to Bavaria, in accordance with the deal, and in Bohemia
the punishments began. Only twenty-seven people were executed, but
more than 700 nobles and landowners were declared deprived of their
estates and sentenced to exile unless they conformed to the
Catholic confession. Protestant churches were closed or destroyed;
Protestant teachers and professors were given three days to leave
the country; the revenues of the University of Prague were turned
over to the Jesuits, the rites of any but the Catholic Church were
forbidden, and even those who wished to leave the country had to
abandon everything they owned. Within less than two years nearly
half the landed property in Bohemia belonged to Ferdinand, and he
announced his intention of selling the whole business for cash, of
which, like all dukes of Austria and Holy Roman emperors, he was
forever short.

Substantially this was the economic error of Alva made when
trying to enforce a similar Catholicization in the Netherlands.
Among the escheated noblemen the majority were certainly
Protestants, but there were also a certain number of perfectly good
Catholics, who regarded the transfer of the imperial electoral
dignity and the proceedings of a king whom they did not even
recognize as a violation of charters and rights. So did many people
inside the empire but outside Bohemia; for instance, Johann Georg,
Elector of Saxony, a Lutheran who detested the Calvinists of
Brandenburg and the Palatinate, and who had been mildly
pro-Hapsburg up to this point. Ferdinand may have acted from the
purest religious motives, but when religious motives pay off so
handsomely, there is at least a suspicion that they are tainted by
something else. Moreover, even if the motive remained purely
religious, the procedure was such as to arouse apprehension.
Ferdinand practically wiped out the Bohemian nobility and replaced
it with Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. If he could do this in
Bohemia, he could do it elsewhere and no one was safe.

Ferdinand proceeded to prove that this was precisely the case.
Various Protestant lords and various mercenary soldiers appeared in
the Palatinate; Tilly beat them all in a series of battles, and
Ferdinand entered upon the same thoroughgoing re-Catholicization as
in Bohemia. There and in Austria, where he had promised the nobles
freedom of worship, Protestant ministers were expelled, the
churches were turned over to the Jesuits and so were the
universities, including that of Heidelberg, long the intellectual
center of Calvinism. Its famous library, one of the finest in
Europe, was carried off to Rome, and little of it was ever seen
again.

The result was a reconstitution of the Protestant union on a
diplomatic rather than a religious basis. Only Johann Georg of
Saxony clung to an impossible neutrality. James I of England
promised money which he never delivered; the Estates of Holland
promised troops which were actually forthcoming, and which formed
the nucleus of an army, placed under the command of an able
mercenary, Graf Ernst von Mansfeld. In spite of a couple of defeats
by Tilly he still ranked high as a solider; and most important of
all, King Christian IV of Denmark entered the combination.

This King of Denmark was not to be taken lightly. He had a
considerable reputation as a military leader, which he deserved. He
had built up the Danish navy to be the first in Europe and set up a
strong Danish army. He was head of the largest, most prosperous,
and most powerful state in the North. Handling him at the same time
as the resuscitated Protestant forces under Mansfeld was a far
different proposition for Ferdinand than merely dealing with the
disorderly Bohemian levies and the mercenaries who had followed the
Elector Palatine. Moreover, Tilly, though technically in the
service of the Catholic League, was actually Maximilian of
Bavaria’s general. Since Elector Max was already claiming pieces of
the Palatinate, the price for Tilly’s services was apt to be
high.

Ferdinand II was thus in something of a dilemma when
Mephistopheles stepped from the wings in the person of a Czech
named Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Waldstein, better known to
history as Wallenstein. In 1617 he was already rich (by marriage)
and growing richer by raising troops for the Bohemian war. He had
made connections with the banking house of De Vito, which had a
patent to buy up and remint all the silver in Bohemia; lent the
emperor up to a million florins, and was one of the chief
beneficiaries of the Protestant confiscations. From these he had
assembled a whole principality and received the title of Duke of
Friedland. He was tall, dark, implacable, and never laughed; and
ruled his subordinates by naked fear. There is no indication that
he had a conscience. At one time he was a member of the Protestant
sect of Bohemian Brothers but, being possessed of an absolutely
infallible gift of foresight, converted in time to ride the rising
wave. His actual faith remained astrology, but in military as well
as civil matters he attained greatness by a process of the purest
intellection without any necessity for training. This was the
character who came forward with an offer that Ferdinand could not
possibly refuse—to raise an army of 50,000 men in the
imperial interest and operate it absolutely without charge if he
were allowed to command it.

It was a mercenary army, but not at Wallenstein’s expense. He
was engaged in a war of conquest and he made it pay for itself; his
troops were well fed and well paid, and the districts through which
they moved footed the bill. The men were a completely motley crowd
in the beginning, welded into a unit by their commander’s
discipline of fear and system of reward. In 1626 he had this army
in marching condition and moved north to cooperate with Tilly
against Mansfeld and King Christian.

Tilly advanced against Christian along the line of the Elbe and
beat him badly in battle, while Wallenstein in the Saxon country
beat Mansfeld and threw him off in the direction of Silesia.
Wallenstein followed hard, broke up Mansfeld’s army in December
1626, and forced its leader from the stage. Tilly was meanwhile
pursuing Christian into Holstein. Wallenstein turned back to join
him, assumed command of both forces as superior officer, beat
Christian again, and flooded the whole of Jutland with imperial
troops. The Danes took to their ships and Wallenstein to the Baltic
provinces. Mecklenburg and Pomerania were overrun, and in March
1628, Ferdinand made his general Duke of Mecklenburg, declaring the
Protestant duke deposed. King Christian signed a peace which took
him out of the war entirely, and in March 1629, Ferdinand crowned
his work by pronouncing the Edict of Restitution.

At this date there remained of the major Protestant states in
north Germany only Saxony and Brandenburg, whose electors were a
pair of soft-shelled creatures, only desirous of being let alone.
There were numerous minor states and free cities belonging to the
old Hanseatic League, neither united nor individually capable of
resisting the imperial power, as wielded by Wallenstein. The Edict
of Restitution required that in all these states and cities
anything secularized since 1552 was to be given back to the Church;
all archbishops, bishops, and abbots were to receive the return of
their sees and full possession of lands lost under the Reformation;
all churches that held gone Protestant were to be reopened for
Catholic worship. Ferdinand was going to re-Catholicize north
Germany as he had Styria and Bohemia; and in the face of
Wallenstein’s 80,000 men there could be no resistance. "There is
too much of this local privilege!" cried the new Duke of
Mecklenburg. "We want one land, one faith, one monarch, as in other
countries!"

But the final steps were to be carried out without Wallenstein’s
personal supervision. In 1630 the Imperial Diet was held at
Regensburg, and even the representatives of the Catholic states
became so exercised over the manner in which the Duke of Friedland
and Mecklenburg had paid and provisioned his army (which had
marched through their lands as well as the Protestant), and over
his growing pretensions (which did not seem to fall short of the
empire itself), that Ferdinand was forced to dismiss him.
Wallenstein retired to a castle in Bohemia; Tilly was appointed to
complete the work of re-Catholicization, as general of both empire
and Catholic League.

III

This was a process that appeared within the competence of Tilly
and the army he headed, since there was no opposition above the
local level. But it was a process which attracted the attention of
a man with a wide forehead, speculative eyes, sharp moustaches, a
pointed beard, and an almost incredible talent for
intrigue—Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, first minister
of France. He had no objection to re-Catholicization, for he was
himself a cardinal; but he had every objection to seeing the
princes of Germany placed in the position of state officers who
held their positions only at the emperor’s pleasure. An emperor
having so vast a territory at his absolute disposal, able to summon
an army like Wallenstein’s out of the ground, and allied with the
Spanish Hapsburgs would not be very long in deciding that France
was next on the list. Richelieu had helped Christian of Denmark
with money; now he turned to the one remaining power that might
accomplish something against this overwhelming empire and agreed to
terms the King of Sweden had previously proposed—a lump sum
down and 400,000 rix-dollars a year, with a truce arranged by
France between Sweden and Poland, where there was a quarrel on.

The French diplomatic reports were excellent, but it is unlikely
that even Richelieu realized quite what he was buying. Sweden, with
her possessions east of the Baltic, had a population of less than a
million and a half, one third that of England, less than a tenth
that of the Hapsburg crown lands. In that system of predatory
states she had been engaged for years in a struggle with immensely
stronger Poland, whose Catholic king claimed her throne, as well as
having to hold off Muscovy and Denmark. What Richelieu did know
about the little nation was that it had furnished reinforcements
and naval help to Stralsund, when Wallenstein besieged it in 1628,
as part of his policy of reducing the Hanseatic towns, and the help
had been effective. Richelieu also know that the Poles were
persuaded to their truce by a stunning defeat at Stuhm. Since the
Swedish king had reported it to his own estates in a one-paragraph
latter, the cardinal could not have known much more.

He certainly was not aware that he had drawn into the conflict
one of the greatest statesmen of the age, Axel Oxenstjerna, and one
of the greatest generals of any age, Gustavu II Adolphus, for whom
Napoleon could find a comparison only in Alexander the Great.
Somewhere between knowledge and ignorance there would be an area of
semi-information, in whose technical details it is unlikely that
Richelieu was much interested. These technical details were due to
Gustavus himself; he was brought up for war and in the expectation
of war, but he had to be his own Philip as well as Alexander. The
furious energy of the Vasa family, to which he belonged, drove him
into almost every available department of human activity (he spoke
nine languages with ease, designed buildings, and wrote hymns which
are still sung), but it was to war that he mainly devoted
himself.

There were never enough troops for Sweden, even though Gustavus’
father, Karl IX, had converted the country from something like a
feudal state into something like a military monarchy by requiring
each district to maintain a certain number of men in the standing
army. Lacking numbers, Gustavus turned to technique when came to
the throne in 1611, and gradually hammered out a series of
improvements—not all of them personally, but he knew how to
state what he wanted, and he knew how to delegate authority, so the
reforms were really his.

What he wanted was a force that could deal with those solid
blocks of Spanish-trained pikemen, the invincibly terciaries. It
occurred to him that these masses of humanity would make admirable
targets for gunfire if gunfire could be brought against them; and
by 1626, Gustavus had discovered the means, by lightening the
musket till it no longer had to be fired from a crotch and fitting
it with a wheel lock. This made it possible to turn two thirds of
the infantry mass into musketeers and to rank them, together with
the one third of pikemen who accompanied them, six deep, instead of
the sixteen, twenty, thirty of the massive Spanish formations.
Nearly all their armor was taken away to let them move.

The cavalry underwent an alteration quite as radical. It had
long been considered that no horse could strike home against blocks
of pikemen; the custom was for them to trot up to an infantry
formation, fire their pistols, file back, and repeat. It struck
Gustavus that no law of nature required so ponderous a procedure;
he trained his horsemen to ride in at the gallop, loose-reined and
bloody-spurred, and to use the sword; moreover, to charge in
successive squadrons. It made for violence, but that was precisely
what the king wanted.

The greatest change was in the artillery. The usual guns
employed in war were so heavy that twenty-four horses apiece was
the normal allowance; the pieces were hauled to the field, put in
place, and the horses led away to safety, while the guns operated
from that spot from then on. In fact, the immobility of artillery
was one of the reasons for the relative scarcity of battles; if
guns were used, the battle had to come about by a kind of mutual
agreement or because one of the commanders was so confident that he
was willing to attack an artillery position. With the help of his
artillery chief, Von Sigeroth, Gustavus introduced a 4-pounder that
could be drawn by a single horse and that used a fixed cartridge;
it could be fired eight times while a musketeer was getting off six
shots. Two of these light guns were attached to each regiment;
slightly heavier two-horse pieces formed an army artillery park.
But the main point was that all these guns could be moved on the
battlefield and under fire, and they were so moved.

Finally, Gustavus would have nothing to do with Wallenstein’s
system of living off the country, or Tilly’s of occasional plunder.
Food, equipment, and clothing were kept in magazines and issued by
proper officers; the men were promptly paid (this was Oxenstjerna)
and they paid for everything they took, under the severest
penalties. This alone was a revolution; no one had ever heard of
such a thing before.

When his instrument was thus constituted, Gustavus summoned his
Riksraad (Senate) and told them he was going to Germany not only
because the cause of Protestantism, of all freedom of thought, was
in the scales, but also because Wallenstein, before his dismissal,
had been named "Admiral of the Empire." His siege of Stralsund, his
attacks on the Hansa towns were specifically aimed at control of
the Baltic. The policy was not likely to be discontinued, and it
would be better to fight abroad than at home. The Riksraad heartily
concurred. On July 4, 1630, Gustavus landed at Peenemunde with
13,000 men. Recruiting agents in Scotland and Denmark were
gathering more and the king expected important aid from the German
princes, but even so this was an insignificant force to fling in
the face of an empire.

Such was the opinion on the other side also. When he heard of
the king’s advance, Ferdinand remarked lightly, "So we have a new
little enemy, do we?" and Wallenstein in his castle spoke of the
"the Snow King," who would melt in a German summer.

IV

Not a Protestant prince stirred to help, not a heart beat
faster. Duke Bogislav of Pomerania only asked the Swedes to go
away; to obtain a base Gustavus had to force Stettin to open its
gates, and incorporated its garrison into his army by decree. (They
turned out to be very good troops.) He held a slender wedge
into the Oder valley, completely surrounded by imperial troops and
towns with imperial garrisons, and even with Stralsund there was
communication only by sea. Of the great Protestant electors, Johann
Geoge of Saxony wanted no part of the war on any terms and Georg
Wilhelm of Brandenburg even refused to allow Swedish troops in his
territory and admitted imperial garrisons to his strong places.

The story of the next nine months can be found in most military
textbooks and is immensely admired by soldiers and very
complicated. Gustavus received acquisitions of force by recruitment
and new men from home, and he reduced the imperialists no little by
victories in small battles and the capture of towns. He had to do
his work by a series of maneuvers as intricate as the passes of an
expert fencer, which he accomplished so well that by May 1631 all
Pomerania, all Mecklenburg except the single city of Greifswald,
had been freed of imperial garrisons and exactions, and the Swedish
king had a bastion in northern Germany which could be penetrated
only at the cost of fighting a battle.

Tilly was not interested in fighting battles except on the most
favorable terms; they were an unnecessary expense. He had adopted
and extended the method of Wallenstein, subduing the country bit by
bit, burning out everything, killing off everyone, and taking all
the goods, so that no hostile army could support a campaign against
him. Behind this policy was Ferdinand, and it was based on the idea
that each Protestant principality would remain quiet, believing
itself safe as long as it remained loyal to the empire. This was
usually correct, but in May 1631 there was furnished an impressive
demonstration of where the peace-in-our-time policy led
Protestants.

The city of Magdeburg had once been the seat of an archbishop
who was ejected by the Reformation. Under Ferdinand’s Edict of
Restitution it must be returned to a prelate, and in April 1631,
Tilly appeared before the town with 30,000 men to demand
submission. The place had been under a loose siege for several
months by Graf Gottfried zu Pappenheim, one of the best imperial
cavalry officers, and Gustavus had been making energetic efforts
for its relief. But between him and Magdeburg lay Saxon
territories, and nothing could move Elector Johann Georg to let him
pass. On May 20, Tilly sent a herald into the town to negotiate;
while the conversations were going on, Pappenheim threw a body of
troops across the wall and the place was taken. The sack that
followed became famous even in the seventeenth century: 40,000
people were butchered and every building in Magdeburg except the
cathedral was burned.

This, then, was the alternative to submitting to the Edict of
Restitution. To Ferdinand the operation was a complete success; it
demonstrated that nothing could stand against the army of the
League and the empire, and he followed it by a series of demands on
west-central Germany. Saxe-Weimar and Hesse-Cassel were to submit
to the Edict of Restitution; Johann Georg was to disband his army,
except for a contingent which was to join Tilly for further police
operations. Tilly was ordered to march at once on Saxe-Weimar and
Hesse-Cassel.

The detachment sent against the former caught a Tartar in the
young Duke Bernard, who later became one of Gustavus’ most trusted
officers, but the main events were in Brandenburg and Saxony. The
fall of Magdeburg irritated Gustavus to the point where he decided
that neutralities in this war were nonsense; he lined up his cannon
at the gates of Berlin and told Georg Wilhelm that he must have
free passage and the keys to the fortress of Spandau or he would
start shooting; and Georg Wilhelm gave in. The Swedes turned
southwest toward the dominions of Johann Georg, who found himself
compelled to join either the imperialists or his fellow
Protestants; and he chose the latter. About 13,000 of his men were
added to Gustavus’ army, and on September 17, 1631, just north of
Leipzig, on the plain of Breitenfeld, Tilly found himself forces to
fight a battle.

It was a decisive battle. There were 26,000 Swedes on the field,
drawn up separately from the Saxons, who were on their left.
Opposite them, the imperialists, huge blocks of terciaries in the
center, cannon across the front, on the flanks masses of cavalry,
commanded by Pappenheim on one flank, Graf Furstenberg on the
other, 40,000 all told, for a straight parallel order fight. Across
the Swedish front were those new light guns under Lennart
Torstensson, who would be no little famous as a general one day. He
opened a fire so hot that Pappenheim on the imperial left could not
take it, and without orders charged the Swedish right, while
Furstenberg, accepting this as a signal for action, went down
against the Saxons. The Saxons fled at the first fire, and Johann
Georg spurred from the field in terror that did not evaporate until
he learned what happened after he left. Furstenberg turned in on
the naked Swedish left while Tilly obliqued his terciaries to the
right to follow and roll up their line.

But things were not going so well for the empire on the other
flank, where Pappenheim charged with his famous Black Cuirassiers.
They found that between his squadrons of horse in that quarter
Gustavus had interspersed small blocks of musketeers; these stood
their ground, shooting down horse and man, and the Swedish cavalry
on their lighter ponies counterattacked so fiercely that Pappenheim
was driven from the field. It was the moment; Gustavus placed
himself at the head of the cavalry regiments of Vastergotland,
Ostergotland, Smaaland, and Finland, hurling them in at the gallop,
in a charge such as no man living had seen, on the flank of the
imperial guns and Tilly’s solid tercias.

These tercias were already having no easy time in front.
They found that the Swedes had held out a reserve; it formed a new
line at right angles to the first, and instead of taking a naked
flank the imperials were up against another line of those
musketeers who shot so fast and, above all, that dreadful
quick-moving artillery. They stood it; the cruel Spaniards,
Walloons, and Croats were hard-bitten fighting men, veterans who
had never known defeat, and they had every confidence in Father
Tilly. But they could not gain an inch against the guns, and the
merciless horsemen kept cutting them down from behind; toward
twilight the stampede began. Seven thousand of the imperialists
were dead, 6,000 more were prisoners, and the Snow King had become
the Lion of the North. In Ingolstadt they offered public prayer for
deliverance from "the Devil, the Swedes and the Finns."

V

It was obvious what the Emperor Ferdinand must do; he now had no
choice but to recall the diabolical genius, Wallenstein. But
Ferdinand had so lively a sense of what this might cost him that
for the time being he merely ordered Tilly to raise a new army in
place of that dispersed at Breitenfeld and cooperate with
Maximilian of Bavaria.

Gustavus turned west into the Lower Palatinate and the
Rhineland. Some critics have blamed him for not marching on Vienna
at once; but just as when he was establishing his secure bastion
south of the Baltic, he was less interested in the spectacular than
in putting things on a really solid basis. In three months he had
the whole area under control; the Protestant princes were now ready
to help, the Catholics reduced to treaties and impotence, the
Jesuits banished. Mainz, which had a Spanish garrison, was taken
after a brief siege, the Spaniards driven back into the Netherlands
and communications between them and the Austrians broken, while
Johann Georg moved his army into Silesia and Bohemia.

During the winter Tilly got his new army on foot; Gustavus
turned toward it and Bavaria in the spring, and came up with the
old general at the river Lech. On April 15, 1632, the question of
forcing a passage across that stream arose. Gustavus answered it by
a device which has since become classic, but in his day was as
original as his light artillery and galloping cavalry. He selected
a bend convex toward his own side, massed artillery all round it,
and made the attack under cover of a smoke screen from burning wet
straw. It was not the least of his battles or his victories. The
imperials lost 4,000 men, including Father Tilly, was had his leg
shattered by a cannon ball. Munich fell and there was now
absolutely nothing for obstinate Ferdinand to do but turn to
Wallenstein.

The genius drove the kind of bargain that might have been
expected. He demanded and received unconditional control of the
army, control of all confiscated territories, a veto on all orders
to be issued by the emperor. That he was promised one of the
electorates is also probable; in practice it would have made him
sole elector.

One of the reasons for Wallenstein’s uncanny prescience was his
ability at analysis. In retirement he had not lost touch with
events, and he understood perfectly where the weakness of Gustavus’
situation lay. It lay in the Saxon alliance, the personality of
Johann Georg, and the fact that he was across the Swedish
communications for any operation in south Germany. As soon as
Wallenstein had recruited a new army, which did not take long, he
moved it into Bohemia and easily drove the Saxons out. At the same
time he very quietly opened negotiations with Johann Georg and
Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg, suggesting that a major objective on
which they could agree was to get the foreign invader out of
Germany. If they concurred, concessions on religion would be
forthcoming—even the abandonment of the Edict of Restitution.
Ferdinand might care for nothing but the true religion; Wallenstein
thought in terms of empire.

He now gathered in the Bavarian forces and moved toward Gustavus
in the region of Nurnberg, where he set up a wide entrenched camp
and waited. He had analyzed Gustavus’ military operations quite as
shrewdly as the political, and understood that the Swedish tactical
system depended on mobility, especially of guns in the field, and
the strategic system on fighting battles. Wallenstein had no such
speed of maneuver and no such artillery. Very well, he would not
fight battles, and see who could stand the deadlock longer. His own
amoral method of supplying his troops should make his problem of
static maintenance lighter than that of the king.

He calculated accurately. For six weeks the armies faced each
other, both going hungry, and decimated by illness. At last, on
September 3-4, Gustavus could stand it no longer and made a
desperate attempt to storm Wallenstein’s lines on a commanding
height. It failed, with the loss of 3,000 men.

The impact of this event was considerable, and it was followed
by another indication that genius had an answer for every problem,
and Wallenstein’s system might be practically superior to that of
Gustavus. It was required of the king to show results, to get the
imperial forces out of the territory, and Wallenstein was
dangerously far north, dangerously close to Protestant lands. To
pull him back Gustavus started a drive toward Vienna. Wallenstein
simply ignored him, marched into Saxony and took Leipzig, then
began to devastate the country around it. Johann Georg sent frantic
appeals for protection to the Swedish king, and the cleverness of
Wallenstein’s political moves became apparent. The imperialists
could spare Vienna far better than Gustavus could Dresden, and the
Swede was forced to send his columns streaming north.

Difficulties of provisioning and the need for garrisons against
imperial raids brought it about that the mobile field force with
Gustavus, as he moved up toward Leipzig, was relatively
small—about 18,000 men, although this was increased by a
contingent under young Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, which presently
fell in. Johann Georg had nearly as many men at Torgau, on the
other side of Leipzig, but letters begging him to join for battle
produced only a reply that they would meet at Magdeburg. Johann
Georg had been in one battle and did not wish to see another;
besides, he could always get some kind of terms from
Wallenstein.

The Czech was at least 33,000 strong; it was already November
and he intended to entrench a camp for winter quarters on much the
same pattern as his lines at Nurnberg, which would force Gustavus
also to be quiet. The place Wallenstein chose was Lutzen, southwest
of Leipzig. There was no height to work with, as in the Nurnberg
position, since this part of Saxony is all one gently rolling
plain, but a road with deep ditches on either side runs from Lutzen
to Leipzig. As a beginning to his entrenched camp, Wallenstein
deepened the ditches until they were very effective trenches,
filling them with musketeers. On the right of his position was
Lutzen village, and behind it the only eminence in the
neighborhood, Windmill Hill; here the bulk of the artillery was
posted. On his left he had the Flossgraben, a fordable stream, but
still a military obstacle.

That is, he was locked in, and could fall on the rear of any
force that tried to get around him. Moreover, it was a position
guaranteed to demobilize Swedish mobility; the causeway road was as
near a straight line as it could be, there was no room for the kind
of maneuvers that had won for Gustavus at Breitenfeld and the
passage of the Lech. When, on November 14, Wallenstein heard that
the king was approaching, he hurriedly sent to recall Pappenheim
with 8,000 cavalry from Halle, where they had been sent to ease the
problem of provision.

Wallenstein’s judgment was that when Gustavus came he would
fight, regardless of numbers, position, or anything else, and he
was perfectly right. Not only did the king intend to attack, but to
attack at once, in spite of a plea from Duke Bernard that he at
least wait for the arrival of two or three thousand men from
Luneberg. Neither would Gustavus sleep in a wagon; it was a damp,
chilly night and his men had to lie on the ground, he would take no
better.

All woke to a dawn heavy with fog; the king ranked the troops
and led the whole army singing "Ein Feste Burg ist unser
Gott," Martin Luther’s hymn. Wallenstein had fired Lutzen
village to keep it from being a cover; the smoke and smell of the
burning drifted through the murk. In spite of poor visibility
Gustavus’ intelligence of his enemy’s position was good, and in
spite of the fact that this must be a straight parallel order
battle he had a plan of maneuver. While Duke Bernard with the
cavalry of the left attacked Lutzen, he himself with a weighted
right wing intended to break down the enemy on that flank, having
noted that it was a "strategic wing," that is, in prolongation of
it lay Wallenstein’s line of communication to Leipzig. If it were
broken through, the imperialists would have no line of retreat.
There were two lines of infantry among the Swedes, as at
Breitenfeld; General Niels Brahe led the first, old Marshal
Kniphausen the second, while Torstensson commanded the artillery
all across the front.

In the imperial lines Piccolomini commanded the Austrian and
Hungarian cuirassiers; facing the king, General Colloredo some
horse and foot supporting the guns around Windmill Hill, while
Wallenstein, in a litter because his gout troubled him so sore, was
carried back and forth along the solid blocks of pikemen along the
center—Spanish or Spanish-trained, the old terciary
formation, not trying to move, as at Breitenfeld, but on the
defensive this day, where they were best. Through the shrouding
mist the guns of both sides boomed.

At ten the fog cleared enough to show the lines to each other,
as through a glass darkly. King Gustavus lifted his sword, as it is
shown in the painting, uttered a brief prayer, and gave the order
for the attack.

VI

Duke Bernard on the Swedish left was overlapped and had a hill
to climb. But he was ardent and a hard driver; the early gain he
made attracted Wallenstein’s attention so that the Czech found it
necessary to take charge there personally. In the center the
flexible Swedish infantry swept forward to the double-ditched road,
Torstensson got some of the light regimental guns up to enfilade
the imperial musketeers in the ditches, and the Swedes went right
across into the imperial artillery positions, captured the big
immobile guns, and spiked them. The big blocks of pikemen behind
had been deprived of most of their musketry support in the fighting
along the road. Now, under the fire of Gustavus’ line, they began
to go back, not breaking, but unable to make a forward movement in
the face of the rapid-firing Swedish muskets and Torstensson’s
light cannon. They went back farthest on their own left, the
Swedish right; Wallenstein was anchoring the other flank, and he
was a good anchor. But even Wallenstein could not hold Windmill
Hill against Duke Bernard when some of Brahe’s infantry joined the
attack; the big battery there was taken.

Yet it was where the king in person led his famous Stalhanske
horse on the Swedish right that the key events were taking place,
and the key to them all was that (in the words of a wandering
Englishman), "As the Battaile was ioyned there fell soe great a
miste that we could not see one another, which if it had not bene,
I beleave wee had quickly made an ende of them (but all must be as
God will have it)." In that murk the Stalhanskes scattered a
group of Croat light cavalry at the first shock, then came through
it against cuirassiers. They were solider, but the Swedes came on
in successive waves; back and down went the imperialists and the
battle was all but won.

All but won. In the blind groping mist word reached the
king that he somehow pulled too far out to the right, that
Wallenstein had brought his pikemen, accompanied by more cavalry,
back against the right flank of Brahe’s infantry line where it
jutted farthest forward. With only four companions Gustavus rode
off to rectify matters, in the mist got into a whole party of the
enemy, and was instantly killed.

The worst of it was that the tale about the counterattack was
perfectly true. Through the fog it fell as a complete surprise on
the extreme end of Brahe’s line and rolled it up. The Swedes went
back to the road, lost one ditch, then the other, and their
artillery had no points of aim; the pikes were better in this
weather. Just as the Swedish infantry began to retreat, Pappenheim
reached the field with his 8,000 fresh cavalry. "Where is the
king?" he demanded, burning to revenge the defeat of Breitenfeld,
and being told, led on against the Swedish right. The horse that
had followed Gustavus nearly to Wallenstein’s baggage camp were
caught at the standstill and, more than doubly outnumbered, driven
back across the causeway. It was five o’clock and the swing of
Pappenheim’s counterattack should have carried the disordered
Swedes right away.

It did not, and there were several reasons why it did not. The
mist began to clear, and Torstensson got his guns going again,
while the imperial cannon in the center were still spiked. The
captured Windmill Hill battery enfiladed their line and discouraged
any advance beyond the road; Pappenheim got himself killed.

But the greatest and the ruling reason was what happened when
old Marshal Kniphausen sought out Duke Bernard to tell him that
Gustavus was dead and the duke was in command of the army; the
second line of foot was still undamaged, and the marshal thought he
could make good a retreat.

"Retreat?" cried Bernard. "This is not the time to talk of
retreat, but of vengeance!" He snatched off his helmet and
rode down the line, shouting in a great, booming voice,
"Swedes! They have killed the king!"

Kniphausen was a careful, accurate soldier. He used his second
line to stay the weak spots of the first at just the right points.
But it was not anything that Kniphausen did that now took charge of
the battle, it was Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and the incredible fury
his words engendered in men who had already been fighting most of
the day. They swept forward in such an assault as has rarely been
seen on any battlefield; in such a rage that afterward there were
found imperialists who had been daggered and even throttled. Brave
men, trained men, the terciaries could not stand it. "The soldyers
flonge down theire armes and ran awaye, and the officers could by
noe means make them longer stande; ffor here Hertike Bernerde
charged himself the enimie soe sore."

Wallenstein’s army was not so much beaten as destroyed, and "the
wilde bores cut off manie of them in theire flyght."

VII

It was more than Wallenstein’s army that was destroyed at
Lutzen; it was also the imperial system and Wallenstein himself.
The genius lasted a couple of years longer at his castle of Eger in
Bohemia when some bravoes sent by Ferdinand burst into his study
and dispatched him. To the imperial mind the only thing that could
justify giving any man power so extensive was a success complete
enough to make possible the disposition of the rest of Germany as
he had the Duchy of Mecklenburg and the noble estates of Bohemia.
When Wallenstein first came on the scene, the objective was still
re-Catholicization. But Richelieu’s intervention and the Battle of
Breitenfeld rendered this so clearly unattainable that the emphasis
had subtly shifted, and what had been a means to an end became the
end itself. The war of religion was decided at Breitenfeld; the war
for the absolute empire was decided at Lutzen.

Before the Reformation, whatever wars took place, there remained
throughout Europe the underlying concept of an essential unity of
Christendom, an idea that all states still formed part of a common
boy. Even after it, when Charles V came to an agreement with the
Protestantizing princes of the empire in 1555, that idea and ideal
remained. It was technically in the name of this idea, however
perverted in expression, that Ferdinand II launched his campaign of
re-Catholicization. It was still in the name of it that Wallenstein
laid his grandiose imperial plans. Lutzen destroyed the ideal; the
concept as well as the fact of European unity broke.

Both Reformation and imperialism were decided on military
grounds and by military means. The system of Tilly and Wallenstein
was essentially to assemble an army so strong defensively that it
was immune to any attack, then march through the enemy’s country,
destroying his resources by devastations—which, incidentally,
paid the soldiers. It even provided mercenary recruits: "Whose
house doth burn, must soldier turn" was a current proverb.
Wallenstein developed this system more thoroughly than Tilly, but
only because he was even more ruthless, and to his predecessor’s
talent for war he added talents in intrigue, finance, and
diplomacy. Yet even in its highest expression this was no more than
a development of the Spanish system of war and it was fundamentally
medieval.

It was this system that Gustavus Adolphus proved invalid. He
proved it invalid tactically at Breitenfeld; proved that a
formation based on mere immunity to attack could always be beaten
if the attack moved fast enough and hit hard enough. The
Spanish-Tilly-Wallenstein system was one of establishing infantry
and its guns as a kind of fortress, with the cavalry making
sallies; but the trouble with a fortress is that it cannot change
shape, and it is always possible for a fast mover to throw
overwhelming force against some part of it.

Gustavus also proved the system strategically erroneous. The
fact that he failed to dislodge the fortress army near Nurnberg
should not be allowed to conceal the other fact that Wallenstein’s
army suffered badly there from hunger and disease, and the second
time Wallenstein tried that trick, he got Lutzen. An army has to
have communications, supply. The fast-marching Swedes could always
threaten communications and force a battle of the kind they wanted
to fight by threatening communications, and this is what Gustavus
did.

Finally and above all, the king produced his demonstration in
the field of morality and morale. The Swedes paid; cities opened
their gates and peasants came with their horses to haul supplies,
even in the Catholic districts from which men fled away before
Wallenstein. This enormously facilitated military operations and
assured to Gustavus the widespread support he began to receive as
soon as he proved he could win battles and protect his adherents
against the exponents of the opposite system.

But in the long run this was perhaps less important than what
the moral values did within the army itself. For the whole of the
Spanish-imperialist system was based on men who were fighting for
what they could make out of it; when it became obvious that they
were not going to make anything, the army dissolved, as on the
afternoon after Breitenfeld and through the smoky twilight of
Lutzen. The Swedish army was recruited from men who were enlisted
for the war, not hired for the campaign. They were fighting for
something, a ponderable ideal, the concept that a man should be
allowed to do his own thinkin. When the king died on the field of
Lutzen, that concept did not; it was the basis of the fury of the
Northmen that carried everything away before it that evening and
forever ended the Middle Ages.

10. INTERLUDE: THE DAY
OF INADEQUATE DECISIONS

I

After Lutzen the Thirty Years’ War became a very inferior
affair. On the Swedish side there was no one with Gustavus’
prestige to keep the Protestant combination together, and it began
to crack at the seams; nor was there anyone with Gustavus’
strategic skill to make a victory mean something permanent. There
was not even anyone who had the king’s tactical ability; the best
was Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, and at Nordlingen in 1634 he sustained
a defeat that changed the whole aspect of the war, and it therefore
entitled to rank as a somewhat decisive battle.

It brought two decisions. Johann Georg of Saxony and a group of
small states in alliance with him, having been delivered from the
fear of Ferdinand’s imperialism at Breitenfeld and from that of
Wallenstein’s imperialism at Lutzen, negotiated a separate peace
with the emperor, to whom at last it had become clear that neither
imperialism could be made to work, and he would have to go on
living in a world from which the concept of European unity had been
lost. Nordlingen also brought the whole of southwest Germany under
imperial authority, and once more closed around France that
Hapsburg ring which Richelieu had been paying the Swedes to
break.

The fact was signalized by the unhindered march of a Spanish
force from Italy to the Netherlands; and with the Saxon group out
of the war, Richelieu felt he could no longer delay in the hope of
finding another ally of the stature of Gustavus. France went in,
and for thirteen years more the armies marched and fought across
the plains and hills of Germany, leaving behind such devastation
that the land had still not recovered 200 years later.

This was the only decision really arrived at. Names renowned in
military history stalk across the pages of that war—the
Swedes Baner, Torstensson, Wrangel, pupils of Gustavus; Turenne,
the Great Conde, Montecuculi. Famous battles were fought and
campaigns made that have excited the admiration of soldiers; but
still no result. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was a peace of
exhaustion.

Why? Because they were all trying to copy Gustavus, and as
usual with military copyists, it was the detail that was imitated,
not the ensemble. They copied his six- or three-deep musketeers
against the huge blocks of pikemen; they copied the light artillery
and the cavalry going in with the cold weapon; they copied his
method of provisioning from a previously established set of
magazines; and after some time they began to copy his process of
recruiting a standing army.

But there was always something a little off key, a little out of
drawing about these copies. The guns were never as light as
Gustavus had made them, nor could they move as fast. The cavalry
made most of its "charges" at a slow trot, expect in the hands of
the Great Conde. Gustavus had been so successful with cavalry that
horse once again became the main arm, as numerous as infantry in
most armies, and sometimes more so; and the question of supply
became most prominently one of forage. The system of magazines was
degraded into becoming an objective in itself; a fortress was the
usual magazine, and it was considered very honorable to force an
adversary to leave his campaigning ground by capturing such a
point d’appui. In fact, it became a main purpose; Turenne
was considered most inelegant for wishing to fight battles instead
of driving the enemy from their positions by maneuver, and he was
often favored with a court order to avoid battle.

On the battlefield also the imitation of what was thought to be
Gustavus’ method became the rule. He had opened the fighting in
parallel order, with his infantry in two lines, guns in little
groups across the front, and cavalry on the wings. Therefore
everybody else adopted this arrangement. They failed to realize
that at Breitenfeld and Lutzen the king placed his guns across the
front in order to get the most out of them against the blocks of
pikemen; at the Lech he did nothing of the kind. The diadochi
completely overlooked the fact that Breitenfeld and Lutzen were
only parallel order battles at the very beginning; that the former
was decided by battlefield maneuver and in the latter Gustavus
concentrated the mailed fist of his greatest weight to smash the
enemy from his communications. Particularly, the successors made no
real effort to use the three arms in combination and according to
opportunity. In their typical battles cavalry fought cavalry,
infantry infantry, and the battle was decided by whose line went
back in a piece.

Nor did they pursue a battle. Gustavus, who had studied the
campaigns of Alexander and knew what pursuit was, followed up his
minor battles and the passage of the Lech remorselessly, but at
Lutzen he was not alive to order a pursuit, and at Breitenfeld it
was unnecessary. In the latter he had broken a mercenary army in
the field, and was perfectly aware that with that breaking the
campaign for which the army had enlisted was over and the army
would dissolve. But the armies that succeeded Gustavus were in
tighter bonds. He had taught them discipline; they did not break up
after a defeat, but retreated to the nearest fortress and asked for
reinforcements, and they were able to do so because they remained
unpursued. The result was that in those showy battles and famous
victories the losing side was pushed back rather than destroyed,
and the contradance of fortress plucking and maneuver went on
again. The whole art of war became as formal as fencing with
buttoned foils—and about as decisive.

This was a condition that lasted for a hundred years.

II

There also developed during the later period of the Thirty
Years’ War a new concept—the concept of the expanding state.
It had been latent all the time, and the dissolution of the old
basic idea of the unity of Christendom as the result of the
Reformation only brought it to the surface. The dominant political
idea of the period following the Peace of Westphalia became that of
a number of states in fierce competition for power, wealth,
territory, everything, and this idea was powerfully pushed forward
by colonizations beyond the seas and the things that flowed
therefrom. Every state was in competition with every other for the
avenues of expansion, and the natural method of competition was
war, just as the natural business of a member of the upper class
was fighting.

In 1661 there was injected into this complex the personality of
Louis XIV, King of France. He was magnificent and very proud,
author of the remark that he was not the head of state but the
state itself, and at the death of his tutor, the great Cardinal
Mazarin, declared he would be his own first minister. It turned out
that he was perfectly capable of doing this, for he was
industrious, patient and, at least in his early years, chose
subordinates with the greatest skill. The idea of the competitive
and expanding state formed a part of his basic mental equipment; he
would no more have questioned it then he would have doubted the
morality of killing cattle for beefsteaks; the only points to be
decided were those of execution.

Therefore wars. Wars directed in the beginning at breaking the
Hapsburg ring around France, then to placing that country in a
position where she would be invulnerable to the ambition of any
nation or combination of nations. In the early years Louis was
lucky enough to catch England under the self-centered later
Stuarts, Spain under Charles II, who was afflicted with fainting
fits and indifference to anything that went on outside the
cathedral, and the Holy Roman Empire busy with a somewhat revived
Turkey. During nearly three decades the French achieved most of
their objectives, and achieved them for good—the left bank of
the Rhine and that part of the Spanish Netherlands which protected
Paris against attack from the north. The plan of these wars, their
strategy and tactics, was essentially the same as those of the last
half of the Thirty Years’ War. There were battles which decided
nothing except that the victorious army would be free to besiege
another fortress, and since the area of operations was heavily
populated and cut up by water courses, the fortresses became more
important than ever. The wars were engineers’ wars, and the
greatest names were those of Vauban of France and Coehorn of
Holland.

III

By 1700 changes had developed in both the technological and the
political climate. The main technological change was the invention
of the socket bayonet, introduced in France in 1687, in most other
countries within the following ten years. It made pikemen
unnecessary and furnished musketeers with a weapon both for driving
home an attack and for defense against cavalry, enormously
simplifying the minor tactics of infantry.

The political change was that up through the complex of
expanding states there pushed the green shoots of a new
idea—the balance of power. If all states were competitive and
expanding, then all were in danger when any one became so great in
territory and resources that it could do as it pleased. This was in
fundamental opposition to Louis XIV’s plan of placing France in
precisely such a position, and the ideological conflict reached the
shooting stage with the death of Charles II of Spain.

He was childless, and his heirs were limited to Louis XIV and
Leopold, Holy Roman emperor. Both resigned their claims to younger
sons of their issue—Louis to Philip of Anjou, his second
grandson, Leopold to Charles of Austria, his second son. Both
agreed to some partition of the vast Spanish heritage, which
included the southern Netherlands and most of Italy besides the
vast empire beyond the seas. But the accession of either would
destroy the precious balance of power, for if concentration and
administrative efficiency had made France incomparably the
strongest nation on the Continent, victories over the Turk had
placed Austria in control of all Hungary. Yet it was judged by most
of Europe that the French danger was the greater, particularly
since the will of Charles II of Spain left his dominions to Philip
and the Spaniards accepted this decision. England and the states of
the empire joined a Grand Alliance with Holland against France, and
the War of the Spanish Succession was on. Bavaria went with France,
a key fact, for it became one of Louis’ politico-military
objectives to drive Leopold from the throne of the empire and
substitute a Wittelsbach dynasty, with Munich as its capital.

That war produced some remarkable soldiers, of whom the best was
probably Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was unable to find military
preferment in France in spite of high birth because of a puny
physique; he went to Vienna and, by unusual courage and the ability
to exercise responsibility, became a field marshal at the age of
twenty-five. A perfect example of the reasons why it was difficult
for any officer of the age to attain decisive results was furnished
by his campaign against the Turks in 1697. At Zenta on the Theiss
he beat them in a battle where they lost 20,000 men—and on
returning to Vienna was placed under arrest for having fought
without orders.

That is, the prevailing doctrine of maneuver and siege ran all
the way back through the echelons to the cabinet level; it was
ungentlemanly to fight hard, and even victory might somehow upset
the magic balance of power. Of course, this was unexpressed, part
of the invisible but universally accepted mental atmosphere, like
the concept of the expanding and competitive state. Only a man of
something close to genius could shake loose from it sufficiently to
form his own ideas—in the large area as well as the limited,
the political as well as the military.

Such a man was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who was
reliably reported to have got his start by jumping out the king’s
mistress’s window at just the right moment. His talent for war
turned out to be quite equal to that for intrigue; in spite of some
extremely dubious connections he was made commander of the army of
the Grand Alliance in the Netherlands. The campaigns of his first
two years there ran according to pattern. His army was at least
half Dutch, there were Dutch civilian deputies at his headquarters
to see that he performed in line with the wishes of their
government, and these wishes were to avoid fighting and take
fortresses.

He took them, but in the meanwhile the Grand Alliance was slowly
losing the war. Villars, the ablest of the French marshals in the
field, drove an army under Prince Louis of Baden into lines at
Stolhofen on the middle Rhine, pinned it there with detachments,
and linked up with the Elector Maximilian II of Bavaria. The
Emperor Leopold had a revolt in Hungary on his hands, and could
have made but a very poor defense if the combined Franco-Bavarian
forces had moved on Vienna, which Villars wished to do. The Elector
Maximilian, however, was in business for a quick profit, and his
ideas of profit had the same limitations as all those in the
balance-of-power, expanding-state period. Instead of striking
boldly for empire, he insisted on spending 1703 in conquering the
Tyrol for Bavaria. Villars became so violent with him as to make
himself persona non grata. For 1704, Louis XIV adopted the
old political device of repudiating the man with an unpopular plan
but accepting the plan. Villars was recalled; the new marshal,
Marsin, was sent out with orders to insist on an offensive into the
heart of Austria. He had the means for it.

Prince Eugene had been operating for the empire in Italy with
some success; he was called back to command the defense, but his
forces were very weak, not over 10,000 troops at the beginning of
the campaign against some 50,000 or more of the Franco-Bavarians.
He got in touch with Marlborough, or Marlborough with him, and very
secretly, to keep the Dutch deputies and the imperial war council
from finding out about it, they concerted a campaign. The position
was that a major French army was operating in the Netherlands; a
secondary one along the Moselle, north of Metz; another in Baden,
under Marshal Tallard, besides the troops of Marsin and the Elector
Max in Bavaria. When spring broke, the bulk of Eugene’s troops,
gradually reinforced, shifted westward to watch Tallard in Baden.
Marlborough’s plan, as announced to the Dutch, was to slip leftward
to the Moselle country. He moved then, on May 25, to Coblenz, where
the Moselle falls into the Rhine, but instead of turning up the
former river crossed the Rhine and kept right on eastward, toward
Bavaria and the Danube.

That march, with bad roads and heavy transport, was slow by
modern standards, but with relation to the speed of movement and
spread of intelligence of the age, it went at rocket speed. On July
3, Marlborough was at Donauworth on the Danube, an important
fortress. He assaulted it and carried it out of hand, with 10,000
loss to the Franco-Bavarians, then began to devastate the Bavarian
homeland in a manner that brought anguished howls from the elector
and the calling in of Tallard’s army from the Baden country. Eugene
followed, linked up with Marlborough early in August, and moved
forward to where the Franco-Bavarian forces were posted on the bank
of the Danube at Blenheim village.

Marsin and Tallard had 60,000 men, strongly arranged behind a
marshy brook, the right anchored on Blenheim and the river, the
left on the hamlet of Oberglau. They had no expectation of
fighting, since Marlborough and Eugene were only 56,000 strong and
one simply did not attack a position like that. But on the morning
of August 13, 1704, the English and imperialists moved forward as
though for reconnaissance and kept right on coming. Tallard had
made the mistake of concentrating his infantry in the two villages;
while Eugene pinned and virtually besieged part of them in
Oberglau, with the help of some uncommonly steady Prussians,
Marlborough did the same at Blenheim, then broke through the
cavalry of the enemy center. When evening closed across the smoking
field, France and Bavaria had lost 38.609 in killed, wounded, and
prisoners, and Tallard himself was taken.

This, now, was decisive; but the area of the decision was not
extensive and the decision itself was in negative terms. Blenheim
decided that Wittelsbach should not replace Hapsburg on the
imperial throne, that the empire would remain in the war, and that
France should not establish a hegemony in south Germany. But it did
not decide the war except in that area, and in 1705 Marlborough was
back in the Netherlands, hampered by lack of men and money,
maneuvering to protect the frontiers of Holland, while Eugene was
in Italy, working in the valley of the Po.

In 1706, Marlborough managed to assemble enough men and
permissions to take the offensive, and won another great battle at
Ramillies; it decided that the Spanish Netherlands, with Brussels,
Dunkirk, Antwerp, and Louvain, should fall into the hands of the
allies. Eugene beat the French at Turin and took all Italy from
them and the Spaniards. In 1708 the two generals were together
again and won a famous battle at Oudenarde; in 1709 they beat the
French at Malplaquet, that "very murdering battle," but nothing at
all followed except more maneuvering and sieges in Flanders and
Brabant and Lorraine, and the war died out in 1713.

The terms of peace gave the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish
Italy to the empire, and thus by reflection rendered Ramillies and
Turin decisive battles—in the same manner Blenheim was, for a
limited area and in terms of denial. The matrix of fortresses,
slow-moving armies restrained from fighting battles, consolidated
states that could easily make good losses, and apprehension lest
the allies of today become the enemies of tomorrow were such that
the defensive had become superior to the attack. The balance of
power had been struck, the expanding state checked; there were no
longer ideas and ideals on the battlefield, only minor decisions
among members of the same system, which had to be determined by
fighting, but which could be settled without rancor. The military
art, which includes everything back to the recruiting stations and
powder mills, no longer permitted major issues to be settled in war
or by war.

11. FREDERICK THE GREAT
AND THE UNACCEPTABLE DECISION

I

When Friedrich II, later called the Great, came to the throne of
Prussia in 1740, he inherited a realm both physically and in
population a little larger than Portugal, but sprawled all across
northeast Germany in little packages, and without any natural
barriers to serve as points d’appui for fortresses. An
unfortunate heritage of the Thirty Years’ War was the fact that the
armies of both sides had marched very much where they pleased,
regardless of neutralities, except in those few cases where the
neutral had an armed force of his own big enough to ensure respect.
Johann Georg of Saxony was such a neutral until the Emperor
Ferdinand forced him to choose sides; Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg
tried to be such a neutral and found he lacked the means. The
lesson was not lost on the strong and imperious Hohenzollerns who
followed him and turned the Electorate of Brandenburg into the
Kingdom of Prussia, and most especially not on Friedrich II’s
father, Friedrich Wilhelm I, not the least strong or imperious of
that remarkable line. In addition, Friedrich Wilhelm was a kind of
military connoisseur. In his younger days he had personally fought
under Marlborough and Eugene at Malplaquet, and had fully accepted
the opinion that one of the leading concerns of a royal personage
was war.

There were no wars anymore, but Friedrich Wilhelm behaved as
though he expected one tomorrow morning. A series of financial and
administrative economies, including the maintenance of his own
court on a scale hardly more elaborate than that of a country
gentleman, gave him one of the fattest treasuries of Europe from
one of its poorest countries. He used the money to equip an army of
80,000, almost as large as the imperial forces, and equal to 4
percent of Prussia’s population. In spite of a conscription
system and the duty laid on males of noble families to serve in the
officer corps from childhood up, little Prussia simply could not
furnish that many men. Friedrich Wilhelm’s recruiting agents
cruised through the whole of Europe in search of what they wanted,
and when the candidates did not come willingly, they were
kidnapped. This was especially true of very tall men; in one of
those evolutionary specializations that made the head of
triceratops almost too heavy to carry, the king devoted vast effort
to assembling a regiment of giants for his personal guard. His
people even sandbagged and carried off an exceptionally tall
Italian priest while he was saying Mass.

The armies of the age of the balance of power were the product
of a sharply stratified society, seeking everywhere to improve its
productive mechanism. Even in soldier-hungry Prussia the fact that
a man was an artisan or a trader exempted him from military
service. It was the business of the middle class to pay taxes to
support the armies, and the men who made them up were drawn from
the lower levels—peasants, vagabonds, the tradeless. As a
result, discipline everywhere was of the severest sort; but this
severity was carried further under Friedrich Wilhelm than anywhere
else in Europe. Flogging through the line was the usual punishment
for talking back to an officer; a man who struck his superior was
simply shot out of hand without trial. With this discipline went
unceasing drill in the Prussian army, day in any day out, till the
men moved like machines, on reflex and without even thinking.

Also there went with it a reduction in the number of movements
required to load and fire a musket, and a new type of iron ramrod,
introduced by Friedrich Wilhelm’s friend and officer, Prince
Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau. In other armies the ramrods were
wood.

The rest of Europe regarded these antics with amusement; the
regiment of giants was funny, and an army that drilled all the time
but never did any fighting was an agreeable royal idiosyncrasy,
like a collection of cameos, and about as useful. Indeed, an
official report to the Holy Roman emperor said that the Prussian
soldiers had been flogged so much that they would infallibly desert
at the first fire.

But on October 20, 1740, the Holy Roman emperor died.

II

King Friedrich II was twenty-seven at the time of his accession,
known for his liberalizing tendencies, his addiction to the arts
and sciences, and what generally considered to be a levity of
temper. He abolished torture, proclaimed the freedom of the press
and absolute religious toleration, and began writing all over
Europe to tempt Voltaire, Maupertuis, anyone with a reputation, to
come to Berlin and help set up an academy. He discontinued the
regiment of giants, gave orders that in view of a prospective poor
harvest the army magazines should be opened and grain sold at low
rates. European editorial opinion was that he would reduce the army
and maintain one of those German courts shining with reflected
French cultural glitter.

All this was before the death of the emperor, Charles VI. He had
produced only daughters, but before his death he spent a great deal
of time and effort hurrying about Europe to get everybody to agree
to sign a document called the Pragmatic Sanction, guaranteeing the
Hapsburg succession to the eldest girl, Maria Theresa, who was
married to Francis, titular Duke of Lorraine. Everybody did sign,
probably most of them with mental reservations, for there were two
women with better hereditary claims, the daughters of Charles’
elder brother, Joseph. One was the wife of Charles Albert, Elector
of Bavaria, and the Wittelsbach house had never abandoned its hope
of becoming imperial; the other was the wife of Augustus, Elector
of Saxony and King of Poland, who did not want the whole heritage,
but only a part of it. Spain and Sardinia also had claims of a
vague sort; and in the background there was always France, ready to
promote anything that would keep the empire weak and divided.

These complications added up to the fact that the Hapsburg
empire, made up of a collection of possessions under varying rules
of inheritance, was surrounded by expanding states, which saw an
opportunity to chip off pieces. But the balance of power and the
futility of war to attain decisions had become so well established
that nobody did anything practical about it until December 16, two
months after Charles VI’s death.

On that date Friedrich marched across the border of the duchy of
Silesia at the head of 30,000 men, claiming it as his own.

Legally the claim was of the flimsiest sort. It was rested on a
document of 1537, in which the Duke of Liegnitz and the then
Markgraf of Brandenburg mutually agreed that if the male heirs of
either line ran out the other should inherit. Actually, as everyone
recognized at the time, it was a straight case of expanding state,
and moreover, expansion by war. The effect was a transvaluation of
values, not instantaneously, but as soon as Friedrich had
demonstrated that something important could be accomplished by such
means.

The demonstration was furnished at Mollwitz on 10 April, 1741,
on a field blanketed with snow. Friedrich had been masking and
besieging fortresses throughout Silesia and his strategy left a
great deal to be desired, but he managed to get some 20,000 men to
Mollwitz to oppose an approximately equal number of Austrians under
Marshal Neipperg. There were several peculiarities about that
battle. Although the total forces were nearly equal, the Austrian
cavalry outnumbered the Prussian slightly more than two to one,
which meant that Austria was similarly deficient in infantry; and
the Prussians had sixty field guns against eighteen. King
Friedrich, in imitation of Gustavus, took his station with the
cavalry of the right wing. In the deployment there was not quite
enough room for all the infantry on that wing, so that some of it
had to be drawn back at an angle, en potence; and the ground
was such that this wing was much forward, nearer the enemy.

The battle was opened by the guns; they galled the horse of the
Austrian left so sore that these charged without orders and carried
the Prussian cavalry right away—including the king, who took
no further part in the proceedings that day. But when the Austrians
tried to finish things by turning in on the infantry flank, they
found themselves up against something much tougher than they could
have imagined. Friedrich Wilhelm’s foot, drilled to the likeness of
machines, did not break, but stood in their ranks and shot the
horsemen down. Five times Austria tried against that angle of the
Prussian right wing, five times the cavalry went back; at the last
charge broken, just as the infantry lines came into contact. The
battalions en potence swung forward, they overlapped the
Austrian left, and with the mechanical Prussians firing five shots
with their iron ramrods for every two of their opponents, with the
overplus of Prussian artillery cutting holes in the Austrian front,
Neipperg’s men could not stand it. They melted away into a wintry
twilight, their line collapsing from left to right.

Mollwitz decided Silesia for the time being, and also made in
Europe a noise almost as loud as Breitenfeld, for it was the defeat
of a mighty empire by a power almost as little regarded as Sicily.
The required demonstration was furnished: namely, that the military
strength of a state is not necessarily proportional to its size,
and that it was still possible to accomplish something by military
means. Forthwith, Charles Albert of Bavaria claimed the whole
imperial heritage, Augustus of Saxony-Poland claimed part of it,
and their alliance was backed by France with force of arms. This
made it practically obligatory for England, already locked with
France in a struggle for overseas dominion, to support Austria, and
the War of the Austrian Succession began.

But these were only the publicly, immediately decisive events
that flowed from Mollwitz. The privately decisive matters, which
became the more important in the long run, were that Friedrich, who
deserves to rank a a great man, if only because he learned
something from every blunder and accident with humility unequaled
in history, meditated long and hard over what happened in battle.
His infantry had withstood the best cavalry in Europe; very well,
infantry trained in the school of Friedrich Wilhelm could turn back
any cavalry. His Marshal Schwerin had urged him to leave the field
after the first cavalry charge, and then won the battle; very well,
he would never leave a battlefield again and Schwerin was in
disfavor. Most important of all was the train of accidents that
resulted in a heavily weighted Prussian right wing striking the
Austrian left at an oblique angle. Friedrich studied military
history very hard and had the memory of an elephant; it reminded
him of Epaminondas of Thebes, and he never forgot it.

III

If you had spoken to an expanding-state dignitary about anything
like consent of the governed or plebiscites, he would have thought
you out of your mind; but the million or more Silesians conquered
by Friedrich at Mollwitz or in the sieges were well content to be
Prussian. They were predominantly Protestant, and the Austrian
Catholic officials, while not actually oppressing them, made things
difficult. Moreover, Prussian administration was more efficient
than Austrian; more precise, with a better sense of essential
justice. Friedrich had not only made a conquest, he had secured the
reconciliation of the conquered.

But there was one person who would never be reconciled to
Prussia in Silesia, and that was Maria Theresa, empress and queen.
She regarded Friedrich as the most wicked and dangerous man in
Europe, and she said so; a reaction not merely of personal pique,
but of an underlying sense that his success threatened the whole
system of which she formed a part. This opinion was implemented
through a long series of diplomatic and military maneuvers. In
1742, at the urging of her British friends, Maria Theresa signed a
peace which turned out to be an armistice. It gave Friedrich his
Silesia and allowed her to turn on the Bavarians and French. In
1743 the French were disastrously defeated in Bohemia and on the
Rhine; Bavaria fell entirely into Austrian hands and Friedrich
re-entered the war as the ally of France, more or less to keep the
revived Hapsburg power from being turned on him alone. In 1744 he
invaded Bohemia and captured Prague, but got himself maneuvered out
by attacks on his communications. In 1745 the Austrians, now with
Saxony as an ally, counterinvaded Silesia and were well beaten at
Hohenfriedberg and Sohr, so that the peace finally signed only
confirmed the verdict of Mollwitz.

In every series of campaigns certain features establish
themselves on a semi-permanent basis as part of the frame of
reference. In the War of the Austrian Succession one of these
features was the operations of the Hungarian irregular light
cavalry, pandours, who hung in clouds across the front and flanks
of every Austrian army. They were barbarians who used to burn
towns, raid camps, and cut the wounded to pieces when they found
them, but they made communications a problem for every army
opposing the Austrian, and they forced the king to fight for his
intelligence of enemy movements. As a result he developed his own
cavalry service on lines parallel to those given the infantry by
Friedrich Wilhelm—careful training, perfect coordination,
precision of movement—and reared up a group of remarkable
cavalry officers, Ziethen, Seydlitz, Rotherbourg. This was not so
much a true light cavalry, like the pandours, but an instrument for
combat intelligence and battle purposes, and it was the first of
its kind.

The infantry did not need improving, only an intensification of
its previous status. Friedrich had discovered that his foot could
not only fire twice as fast as its opponents, but also that it
could maneuver much faster, and on this he based a new system of
minor tactics. The infantry was to fire a platoon volley, advance
four paces behind the smoke while reloading for the next volley
and, when close enough to the bullet-racked enemy line, fall on
with the bayonet.

In major tactics every one of his big battles of the
war—Chotusitz, Hohenfriedburg, Sohr—was a deliberate
repetition of the accident of Mollwitz. In each Friedrich pushed
forward a heavily loaded right wing, took the enemy at the oblique,
and rolled up his line. There were variations in the individual
case, but this was the basic pattern, and it was noted beyond the
borders of Prussia.

IV

This was the military background for the next act. Part of the
political background was furnished by the fact that, having
obtained what he wanted, Friedrich was opposed to war. "We must get
rid of it as a doctor does of a fever." But there was now on
the imperial side Wenzel Anton, Graf von Kaunitz, counselor to
Maria Theresa. She had been rather reluctantly willing to accept
Bavaria in compensation for the loss of Silesia, but the peace that
ended the general war gave her neither, and though her husband
secured election as emperor, there remained in her an
inextinguishable fund of bitterness against the robber who had
taken her province.

Wenzel Anton (who exercised by riding in hall to avoid fresh air
and kept dozens of kittens, which he gave away as soon as they
became cats) exploited this bitterness, and he exploited it in the
name of the balance of power. He argued that the presence of a new
great power in north Germany—and with her army and accession
of territory, no one could doubt that Prussia had become
one—had deprived Austria of her proper place in Europe and
freedom of action. If she was ever to recover either, if the French
influence which had become so predominant in Europe through
Friedrich was ever to be allayed, Prussia must be destroyed.
Austria’s traditional alliance was with the sea powers, England and
Holland; but it was hopeless to expect these Protestant nations to
support an enterprise against Protestant Prussia. The true line of
Austrian policy was therefore in forming an alliance with France
and Russia, the former of whom could be repaid in the Netherlands
and Italy, and the latter in East Prussia, none of which lands were
really part of the empire.

Thus Kaunitz to the empress. It was not hard to talk Russia into
the combination, for Russia was perpetually ambitious and, for
quite personal reasons, the Russian Empress Elizabeth had conceived
a deep dislike for Friedrich. France and some of the lesser
states—Sweden, Saxony—came harder, but Kaunitz was a
diplomat of almost uncanny skill, who had a goodie for everybody.
Also he was aided by the underlying feeling he used with the
empress, more a sensation than a statable idea, that the balance of
power had been overthrown by the expanding Prussian state, and
there was no security for anyone unless this tendency was
ruthlessly punished. France signed; and England promptly allied
herself with Friedrich—the sea power to furnish money, the
Prussians troops for the protection of King George’s Hannover.

These were the roots of the Seven Years’ War, the first of the
true world wars, itself decisive in more than one way, but whose
importance is often hidden beneath the overlays of later
struggles.

The actual fighting began in August 1756, when Friedrich invaded
Saxony without a declaration of war, occupied Dresden, and shut up
the Saxon army in an entrenched camp at Pirna. His espionage
service was exceptionally good; he had a man named Menzel in the
Saxon chancellery who, incidentally, was discovered and spent the
remaining eighteen years of his life in irons in prison growing a
fine crop of hair. Friedrich published the documents Menzel
furnished as a justification for his aggression against Saxony. Not
that it did much good, since the adroit Kaunitz instantly summoned
the Diet of the empire and persuaded all the smaller states to send
contingents to an imperial army, which made part of the half
million men who began to flow in for the demolition of Prussia.

Friedrich’s aggression succeeded in its first object. Saxony was
knocked out, and what was left of its enlisted troops was offered
the choice of serving under Friedrich henceforth or going to
prison. Friedrich invaded Bohemia for a second time, won a battle
under the walls of Prague, threw a blockade around the town and
pressed southward until he encountered an army twice the size of
his own under Marshal Leopold Josef Daun at Kolin on June 18,
1757.

This officer was probably the best commander Friedrich ever
faced. His plan was the same as that of the usual Austrian
leader—draw up and await attack, since he lacked the mobility
to compete with the Prussians in maneuver. But he chose his
position very well, the left on a high wooden ridge, center running
across little knolls and swampy pools, and right resting on another
hill, with an oakwood on it and a marshy stream running past. Daun
was in three lines instead of the usual two; all across the front,
in reeds, woods, and tall grass, he scattered quantities of Croat
irregular sharpshooters. Friedrich judges the Austrian left
unassailable and angled to his own left to make an oblique attack
on that wing, with each of what we would call his brigades to
follow on in turn, swinging rightward when they reached position to
sweep out Daun’s line. The leading formation, Hulsen’s, did break
through the extreme flank and drove back the first two Austrian
lines; but those that followed had to cross Daun’s front, with the
fire from the Croats coming into their flanks. One group halted and
faced round to drive off these tormentors by firing a few volleys,
and the brigade immediately behind, believing that the battle plan
had been changed, also faced round and went into action.

That is, they had begun too soon, and in somewhat the wrong
place. This should not have been fatal, for Friedrich had a strong
column under Prince Moritz of Dessau coming up to form the link
between Hulsen and the groups prematurely engaged. But Friedrich
chose this moment to lose his temper and order Moritz in at once,
using a form of words that caused him also to make contact too
soon. The consequence was that Hulsen was isolated. The Austrians
counterattacked him, completely broke up his formation, turned in
on the flank of the remainder of the Prussian line, and drove
Friedrich from the field with 13,000 lost out of 33,000 men.

The allies now thought they had him and began to shoot columns
at him from all directions. The Prince of Hildburghausen with the
army of the empire, and Marshal Soubise with the French, together
63,000 strong, drove toward Saxony; 17,000 Swedes landed in
Pomerania; 80,000 Russians moved in from their side, and Charles of
Lorraine, with his own and Daun’s troops, over 100,000, marched on
Silesia from the south.

That summer there was fighting all around the circle, with
Prussia slowly going down. The Swedes were incompetently led,
accomplished nothing against the detachment that faced them, but
they still forced Friedrich to make that detachment. The Russians
beat a third of their number of Prussians in a battle, but their
supply organization broke down, the machine ground to a halt just
when it might have taken Berlin, and a large part of the army
melted away in desertions. The Austrians, as might be expected,
made a war of sieges, but it took 41,000 men to keep them from
overrunning everything, and Friedrich could gather barely 22,000
men to meet the incursion of Soubise and Hildburghausen into
Saxony.

There was some maneuvering west of the Saale before the two
armies faced each other at Rossbach, Friedrich’s at the western
terminus of a sausage-shaped complex of low eminences, with the
Janus and Polzen hills at his rear. The Austrians were moving in
Friedrich’s strategic rear, and however slowly they advanced, he
was required to do something. He was proposing to attack the enemy
camp, a rather desperate undertaking in a completely open plain
dotted with villages, when on November 5 they saved him the
trouble.

Soubise and Hildburghausen had been reading, and from their
documents they learned that the King of Prussia won battles by
throwing his full strength against the enemy’s left flank. Now they
decided to outdo him by hurling their whole army quite around his
left and rear to take the hills there and cut his communications.
They formed with their cavalry in the vanguard, the infantry in
three columns behind, and began a wide sweep around the Prussian
left through the village of Pettstadt, with their trumpets
blowing.

There were only three defects in this plan. One was that the
plain was completely open, and Friedrich had an officer on the roof
of the highest building in Rossbach who could observe every move;
the second was that the tracks were both sandy and muddy, and the
march slow; and the third was that the moving column, in some
witless idea of gaining surprise, threw out no scouts or cavalry
screen. When word was brought to the king that the enemy had swung
through Pettstadt, he calmly finished his dinner, then at the
double-quick took up an entirely new disposition. Seydlitz, with
all the cavalry, was posted out of sight behind the Polzen hill,
with a couple of hussars as pickets atop; the artillery on the
reverse slope of Janus, only the muzzles projecting; the infantry
behind the guns, most of them rightward. The beginning of the
movement and the apparent disappearance of the Prussian force were
observed from the allied army; they assumed that Friedrich was
retreating, and ordered hurry to catch him.

As they sped up, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Seydlitz came
over Polzen Hill with 4,000 cavalry, "compact as a wall and with
incredible speed." He hit the allied horse vanguard in flank and
undeployed; rode right through them, overturned them utterly, and
drove what was left from the field. Seydlitz followed till the rout
was complete; then sounded a recall and formed in a dip of ground
at Tagweben, behind the enemy right rear. The moment their field of
fire was cleared the Prussian guns opened on the hapless allied
columns, tearing down whole ranks, and as they strove to deploy,
Friedrich’s infantry came over Janus Hill, all in line and firing
like clockwork. As the writhing columns tried to fall back, tried
to get their rear battalions in formation, Seydlitz came out of his
hollow and charged them from the rear. It was one of the briefest
great battles of record; by four-thirty the allied army was a
panic-stricken mob, having lost 3,000 killed and wounded, 5,000
prisoners, and sixty-seven guns. The Prussian losses were 541.

Worst of all for the allies, what was left of their army was so
broken that it could never be assembled again. Rossbach was
decisive in the sense that it took France out of the war against
Friedrich; he had no more fighting to do against the French except
by deputy in Hannover. He had cracked the circle of enemies; and he
had also achieved a focus for German nationalism and assured the
support of England. After the battle Parliament increased his
subsidy almost tenfold.

But there was still almost too much for any one man and any one
army to do. While Friedrich was eliminating the imperial and French
armies from the war, Austria had slowly rolled up all of southern
Silesia, beaten the Prussian forces there in battle, and taken
Breslau and Schweidnitz, with their huge, carefully assembled
magazines. Friedrich turned over command of the beaten army to
Ziethen, a thick-lipped ugly little man; picked up his forces at
Parchwitz, and hurried forward to offer the Austrians battle.

He now had 36,000 men and 167 guns, of which one big battery was
superheavy pieces brought from the fortress of Glogau. Prince
Charles and Daun had nearly 80,000. The latter had expected winter
quarters, but the news of Friedrich’s approach drew him out of
Breslau into a position in double line. The right was under General
Lucchesi, resting on the village of Nippern, behind a wood and some
bogs, the center at Leuthen village, the left on Sagschutz. The
tips of both wings were somewhat drawn back, and General Nadasti,
who commanded the left, covered his position with abbates.
Forward in the village of Borne was a cavalry detachment under the
Saxon General Nostitz, but most of the cavalry were in reserve
behind the center.

It may have been that Friedrich had some doubts about the morale
of the beaten army Ziethen now commanded; if so, they were
dispelled on the freezing dark night of December 4, when he rode
through the camp and all the soldiers hailed him with, "Good night,
Fritz." He assembled his generals and told them that what he
intended to do was against all the rules of war, but he was going
to beat the enemy "or perish before his batteries," then gave
orders for an advance at dawn.

It struck Nostitz and his detachment through a light mist.
Ziethen charged the Saxons furiously, front and flank, made most of
the men prisoners, and drove the rest in on Lucchesi’s wing. There
was a halt while the mist burned away and Friedrich surveyed the
hostile line. He knew the area well, having maneuvered there
frequently; rightward from Borne there was a fold of ground that
would conceal movement, and he immediately planned to do what the
allies had attempted on his at Rossbach—throw his entire army
on the enemy left wing. As a preliminary, the cavalry of the
vanguard were put in to follow up the Nostitz wreck in the opposite
direction. This feint worked; Lucchesi, who like Soubise and
Hildburghausen knew of Friedrich’s penchant for flank attacks,
imagined he was about to receive a heavy one and appealed for
reinforcement. Prince Charles sent him the reserve cavalry from the
center and some of that from the left.

But the storm died down there, and to Charles and Daun, standing
near the center, it seemed that this must have been a flurry to
cover the retreat of inferior force, for Friedrich’s army had
passed out of sight. "The Prussians are packing off," remarked
Daun. "Don’t disturb them!" There is no record of his further
conversation down to the moment a little after noon, when
Friedrich’s head of column poked its nose from behind the fold of
ground and the whole array of horse, foot, and artillery did a left
wheel and came rolling down on Nadasti’s flank at an angle of maybe
75 degrees.

Nadasti, a reasonably good battle captain, charged in at once
with what cavalry he had, and succeeded in throwing Ziethen back,
but came up against infantry behind, and was badly broken. Once can
picture the hurry, confusion, and shouting as his whole wing, taken
in enfilade by the Prussian volleys, went to pieces. But there were
so many of these Austrians that they began to build up a defense
around the mills and ditches of Leuthen, and especially its
churchyard, which had stone walls. Prince Charles fed in battalions
as fast as he could draw them from any point whatever; in places
the Austrians were twenty ranks deep, and the fighting was very
furious. The new line was almost at right angles to the old and
badly bunched at the center, but still a line, heavily manned and
pretty solid.

Friedrich had to put in his last infantry reserves, and even so
was held. But he got his superheavy guns onto the rise that had
concealed his first movement, they enfiladed the new Austrian right
wing and it began to go. At this juncture Lucchesi reached the spot
from his former station. He saw that the Prussian infantry left was
bare and ordered a charge. But Friedrich had foreseen exactly this.
The cavalry of his own left wing, under General Driesen, was
concealed behind the heavy battery, and as Lucchesi came forward at
the trot, he was charged front, flank, and rear, all at once. It
was like Seydlitz’s charge at Rossbach; Lucchesi himself was killed
and his men scattered as though by some kind of human explosion,
while Driesen wheeled in on the Austrian infantry flank and rear
around Leuthen. Under the December twilight what was left of them
were running.

V

Leuthen was the extremest example of Friedrich’s oblique-order
attack and also his most destructive victory. He lost 6,000 men,
but the Austrians lost 10,000 in killed and wounded, besides 21,000
prisoners, and two weeks later Breslau surrendered, with 17,000
more. The effect was crushing, but it was not decisive, except
locally and in a temporary manner, as to who should hold Silesia
until the next campaign.

Austria was unable to get another army into the field until late
in the following summer, but in the meanwhile the Russians, who had
thus far been trying to assure themselves of the possession of East
Prussia, pushed a column into the home counties as far as Frankfurt
an der Oder, and Friedrich had to go fight it. He beat it at
Zorndorf in a slaughtering battle in August, but by October the
Austrians were on foot again, now under Daun, and at Hochkirch they
beat the king.

They beat him in a way one would have least expected against so
acute a commander, by leaving their watch fires burning while they
made a night march and surprised him at dawn. That is, they caught
him being careless. And in the following summer, 1759, a combined
Austro-Russian army inflicted a paralyzing defeat on Friedrich at
Kunersdorf, one in which he lost over 20,000 men—again
through his own fault, for he sent his troops into action after two
days without sleep, up a steep hill in broiling sun. "Will not some
curst bullet strike me?" he cried afterward, and "I believe
everything is lost," he wrote.

But he had done better than he thought and everything was not
lost; neither after Hochkirch nor Kunersdorf did his enemies make
any follow-up. They could not; they were too disorganized in terms
of lost officers, mingling of regiments, breakdown of supply. They
had no such solid basis as the Prussian army; when any of them lost
a battle, that particular campaign was over, when it won, it merely
went on.

A realization that their sole real asset was numerical
penetrated allied minds in 1761, and they adopted a plan of
campaign to make numbers count. There were to be three columns, one
operating through Saxony under Daun, one through Silesia under the
Austrian General Loudon, and a Russian column through Poland. Each
was to deplete Friedrich’s resources by eating up the towns. He
could maintain only one army large enough to deal with any of the
three; whenever he turned against one, the others would keep moving
stolidly toward Berlin.

This plan was modified by events. The Russians came slowly
through northern Silesia. Daun was also slow, and when Friedrich
turned against Loudon, the Austrian marshal thought he saw an
opportunity to repeat the surprise of Hochkirch. He swung around
toward the northwest of Friedrich’s position at Liegnitz while
Loudon marched by a circuit to close him in from the northeast,
with the Russians under General Czernicheff pushing up from
behind.

But Daun did some careful scouting from the heights above
Liegnitz, which not only slowed his march, but attracted
Friedrich’s attention. On the night of August 14, 1761, the king
turned the Austrians’ trick right around on them, leaving a group
of campfires burning and making a fast march along the road Loudon
was to occupy. Loudon reached it cross country in the morning; was
received by musketry fire, and being already too deeply committed
to get out without battle, fought one that cost him 10,000 men and
eighty-one guns. Daun reached Friedrich’s former camp only just in
time to see the column of smoke rising over the defeat to the
north; his pursuit was not a success.

As for the Russians, Friedrich supplied a peasant with a message
addressed to his brother, Prince Henri, who was facing them:
"Austrians totally defeated today, now for the Russians. Do what we
agreed upon." The peasant was to let himself be taken by
Czernicheff and give up the paper to save his own life. There is
something peculiarly pleasing about these devices of Friedrich the
king; they are so firmly rooted in understanding of the men he was
dealing with and so unexpected. This one worked precisely according
to prescription. Czernicheff, beset by nameless terrors, marched
right away from the area of action and the Russians were next heard
of besieging Kolberg on the Baltic coast, which would be more use
to them than another victory over Friedrich, anyway.

Two of the three attacking columns were thus eliminated, for
Loudon had been so badly knocked about as to be out of it.
Friedrich spent some weeks maneuvering in Silesia, but was recalled
by the news that Berlin had been taken. He rushed north with his
army; it turned out to be not a serious occupation, but a handful
of Cossack raiders and a wing of Austrian light cavalry, who
dispersed at once. But it was now evident that something would have
to be done about the Daun column, which had taken nearly all Saxony
and established itself at Torgau, 64,000 strong. By whittling down
garrisons Friedrich managed to assemble 45,000 men, and approached
the place at the end of October.

It was not Daun’s intention to fight, except as he had done at
Kolin, long ago, on terms that would force the king to attack under
every disadvantage. He chose his position very well for the
purpose, along a certain Siptitz Hill that runs roughly westward
from Torgau. Its southern edge was covered by a deep, wide, muddy
brook, the Rohrgraben, a good military obstacle; all around the
height were sparse forests of pine, growing out of sand. The lines
were so good that Prince Henri had previously held them against
this same Daun with much inferior forces, and the Austrians now had
no less than 400 guns.

Friedrich moved up toward the installation from the south. It
struck him at once that the place was unduly cramped for as many
men as Austria had and offered poor opportunities for mounting a
counterattack, and he determined to assault it from front and rear
simultaneously. Ziethen, with nearly half the army, would take the
southern side, across the brook; Friedrich himself would swing by a
circuit through the woods in three columns, the outermost one of
cavalry.

The king marched fairly early; it was nearly two in the
afternoon when Friedrich, leading the innermost column, reached the
edge of the woods, just in time to hear the boom-boom of guns from
the southward. To him this meant that Ziethen was already engaged;
there was no sign yet of his second column or his third, but he
immediately hurled 6,000 grenadiers straight at the Austrian
position.

The trouble with any converging-column arrangement is that it is
impossible for the commander of one wing to know precisely what is
happening to the other. Ziethen’s engagement, in fact, was with
some outposts of light troops, who had a few guns south of the
Rohrgraben. These retired slowly eastward, in the Torgau direction,
drawing the Prussians out of their true line of advance during
hours, which caused Friedrich later to rate Ziethen roundly for his
stupidity. But this was no help at the moment to the 6,000
grenadiers, who were met by the fire of nearly all the 400 Austrian
cannon. Friedrich himself said he never saw anything like it; the
Prussian artillery was smashed before it had a chance to load, the
grenadiers were cut to pieces. Enough of them survived to reach the
Austrian line for some deadly lose work, but Daun brought up
infantry, drove them out, and even tried a counterattack, which
came to considerable grief in a heavy shower of rain. At the end of
it not 600 of the 6,000 were left; it was three o’clock and the
attack had failed.

Shortly later Friedrich’s second column arrived; there was a
pause for reorganization, and at about three-thirty it and the
remnants of the first attack went forward again. This was the
hardest fighting of the day, along the northwest portion of Daun’s
line; the Prussian infantry got in among the guns, and there was
hot hand-to-hand work on Siptitz Hill, but Daun summoned his
reserves from every quarter and after a long struggle drove the
Prussians back again, the king himself wounded.

Not until four-thirty, with the sun down, was the coming of the
cavalry, which had gone astray in the woods. Friedrich dauntlessly
organized a third attack through gathering dark and smoke, cavalry
and infantry together. This storm was at least a partial success:
four whole regiments of Austrians were taken, with many of the
guns; Daun’s whole left wing was reduced to a jelly-like
consistency, and there was confusion all through his lines, but the
thing could not be carried forward. Friedrich gave orders to
bivouac on the field and try again next day if possible; Daun,
himself wounded, sent off a courier of victory that caused all the
windows of Vienna to be illuminated.

But at six, under a night grown wet and very cold, there was a
sudden glare of red in the sky southward. It was Ziethen, free at
last of his preoccupation with the Austrian light forces, trying to
close to the sound of the king’s guns, and he had taken the village
of Siptitz, south of the Rohrgraben, and set the place afire. His
men could not cross the stream through the blazing village, but an
intelligent officer named Mollendorf found a bridge beyond it, and
Ziethen poured through, up a saddle at the southwest angle of the
ridge and down on the Austrians, his drums beating the Prussian
march, muskets all in line blazing across the dark.

There is a famous picture of Friedrich, wrapped in his cloak,
chin on chest and stick across his knees, waiting in deepest
discouragement for the dawn at Torgau. The dawn came before the
day, it is said, in the person of Ziethen himself, to tell the king
he had won after all, the Austrians were driven through Torgau with
a loss of 10,000 men and most of their guns. Daun’s army was
a wreck and the allied campaign with it.

VI

There was some bickering and some maneuvering the next year,
with Friedrich on the defensive and neither Austrians nor Russians
daring to besiege or attack; and early in 1762 the Tsarina
Elizabeth died and Tsar Peter, her successor, made peace with
Friedrich and sent a Russian corps to his help, while France
could no longer pay subsidies to Austria, and Maria Theresa had to
reduce her army to 20,000 men.

It may be put that Torgau ended it. It did not decide the
war—probably the one battle that went furthest in that
direction was Rossbach—but it decided that Austria could not
carry the war to a successful conclusion. And in so doing it
established in north Germany a new state and a new type of state,
with a standing army, a centralized administration, officials who
looked to the building of dams, canals, roads, bridges, internal
communications, and who promoted agriculture and internal
colonization. Before Friedrich the Great’s death he had settled
200,000 people on previously unoccupied lands; and the efficiency
of his administration was such that the other nations of Europe
were forced to imitate him if they wished to remain level in the
complex game of the balance of power. "It appears," he said once,
"that God has created me, pack horses, Doric columns, and us kings
generally to carry the burdens of the world in order that others
may enjoy its fruits." His ideal of peace was to have the
government help every citizen; his ideal of war was not to have the
civil population know that a war was going on. His seizure of
Silesia was doubtless anything but moral; but when he made it stick
on the field of battle, he forced the rest of Europe into a new
sense of the responsibility of government.

12. QUEBEC, QUIBERON,
AMERICA

I

The fog cleared in the afternoon to show the uneasy chop normal
off Cape Race at this season, and British ships all around. M. de
Hocquart, Captain of His Most Christian Majesty’s ship
Alcide, 64, knew enough about his English to suspect their
intent, and made sail, but the necessity of tacking brought some of
them always nearer, and at about eleven the next morning a
two-decker was close aboard to windward and a heavier ship hauling
up fast. A red flag snapped to the two-decker’s graff, the
ammunition signal; Hocquart lifted his speaking trumpet and shouted
across the swell, "Are we at peace or war?"

"La paix, la paix," came the reply.

"Who is your admiral?" asked Hocquart.

"The Right Honorable Edward Boscawen."

"I know him well; he is a friend of mine."

"What is your name?"

Before Hocquart could reply there was a crash as every gun in
the two-decker’s broadside went off, and a moment later another
from the big ship. Alcide made what defense she could, but
the odds were too heavy and De Hocquart presently hauled down his
flag, with eighty-seven dead aboard. Off to the west two other
British were taking the transport Lys.

The date was June 8, 1755, and though the British captain had
been technically right when he called out the word of peace, De
Hocquart was as well aware as he that matters must sooner or later
come to the cannon. For the two French ships were stragglers from a
fleet sent to reinforce Quebec, and in London there sat that
strange, grumpy, gouty, and furiously able man, William Pitt, who
had, as it were, an oath registered in heaven to put a period to
the colonial ambitions of France. At the moment he was not actually
in power, but it was his spirit that had driven England on, and no
administration could draw back from the line he had taken.

The conflict was one of mutually incompatible ambitions, of
opposed dynamisms seeking the same object. The strategic lines were
extremely simple; France held the St. Lawrence and at least the
mouth of the Mississippi, and was embarked on an effort to link
them together in a cordon that should forever limit the British
colonies to the eastern watershed of the Appalachians. The British
were embarked on an effort to break that cordon, and the prize was
a continent. (There is a curious parallel to the continuing French
effort to pierce the Hapsburg cordon in Europe.) The taking
of the Alcide was only accidentally the first tactical
incident. At that very hour Edward Braddock was marching to his
death on the Monongahela, Baron Dieskau was preparing to lead a
motley column against the English establishment on the lakes that
flow into the Richelieu, and the western frontier of the colonies
was all one blaze of war.

It became formal in May 1756, and one of the leading
protagonists stepped on the scene, Louis Joseph, Marquis de
Montcalm, newly appointed commander of the French land forces in
Canada. He was a small man, very vehement, ardent and
uncompromising, who gestured rapidly as he talked; had fought with
credit in Bohemia and Italy; was the complete antithesis of the man
with whom he was supposed to work, the Sieur de Vaudreuil, Governor
of Canada. The latter was a colonial, who regarded all officers
from metropolitan France with dislike and suspicion, and most
especially those belonging to the army, for Canada was under the
naval establishment, and the troops Vaudreuil commanded were
technically marines. There were nearly 3,000 of these; Montcalm had
about as many army regulars; and in addition there were available
the Canadian militia, never called to the colors to the extent of
more than 1,100 men, very good forest fighters and trackers, very
poor in any stand-up battle.

On paper this was a singularly small defensive force for so
important an area, and in fact it was, but the knowledge and
attitudes of the time have to be taken into account. Nobody knew
that the struggle for a continent was engaged; in fact, nobody knew
there was a continent there. The general supposition was that the
land ended somewhere not far beyond the Mississippi. To French
policy makers Canada was another island like St. Domingue or
Martinique; like them, a part of naval strategy and a matter for
naval administration. Moreover, the current government of France
was predominantly non-naval or even anti-naval. It was actually in
the hands of the king’s mistress, Mme. de Pompadour; she grudged
every livre spent on a ship, and was interested chiefly in helping
out her good friend, Maria Theresa of Austria, in putting down that
evil man, Friedrich of Prussia, and in securing French predominance
in western Germany. The number of French colonists in Canada was
not above 80,000 as against a million in the British colonies.

However, there were countervailing factors which made the French
military position much stronger than either population figures or
home government indifference would indicate. One of these was that
by their very organization the British colonies were unable to
deliver in the field anything like the force their numbers appeared
to indicate, but more important were the Indians. From the
beginning British policy was to drive them out, dispossess them in
favor of more British colonists; from the beginning French policy
was to make friends with them, intermarry, and use them as bird
dogs for the fur trade. It was no accident that the series of borer
conflicts was called the French and Indian Wars. Montcalm
thought these allies were dirty villains, but recruited them all
the way from Lake Superior and the Des Moines River, and they were
a ponderable force.

For the expanding frontier was by its nature open, and even the
secondary line of defense could not always be made good against
raids. Armaments that might easily have dominated Canada were
pinned down to tasks of security, and military operations were
directly affected. All the lines of communication between the
French colonies and the British lay through the woods, and while
these woods were full of pro-French Indians, Montcalm could move
easily and with a minimum of transport, his opponents only slowly
and with difficulty, making heavy detachments for flank guards and
outposts.

Although Montcalm got his training in the plains warfare of
Europe, he turned out to be just the man to use the dirty villains,
and one of those driving characters who overcome all obstacles
besides. By August of 1756 he had an expedition landing at Oswego,
one of the anchors of the English border, and when the colonial
scouts arrived three days later, they found nothing but staved-in
rum casks and burned buildings. Lake Ontario was wholly French, and
middle New York open to Indian raids.

The following summer Montcalm launched an expedition against
Fort William Henry, at the head of Lake George. There were promptly
revealed some of the other factors balancing the over-all French
deficiency in numbers. Everything went wrong on the English side.
The commander in America was Loud Loudon, "whom a child might
outwit or terrify with a popgun"; the colonial governors failed to
call out the militia; the commandant at nearby Fort Edward had not
men enough to attempt a relief, and in addition was a coward. Fort
William Henry fell and a good many of the prisoners were massacred
by the Indians among scenes that provided James Fenimore Cooper
with his best novel.

The whole frontier quivered with terror.

This victory solidified the reputation of France and Montcalm
among the Indians. But he could not control these unruly cattle,
and when they all went home after the fall of Fort William Henry,
he had to postpone the business of gradually eating up the British
colonies for another year. And during that year there came to power
in England not merely the spirit of William Pitt, but William Pitt
in person, a man with a quite different set of ideas than his
predecessors.

Their general theory may be described as one that the colonies
could best be defended in Hannover; Pitt’s that the essential
struggle was naval and colonial, in which decision would be found
on the banks of the St. Lawrence. A vast tide of energy and effort
flowed from the man; he not only worked like a devil unchained
himself, he demanded that everyone else do so. He recklessly
promoted men without regard to their political connections and
removed them with the same insouciance. The incompetent Loudon was
replaced by General James Abercrombie; to help him Pitt jumped
Colonel Jeffrey Amherst, who had done well in Germany, at one step
to a major general, and for 1758 there were planned three
expeditions to break the French cordon in North America.

One was against Fort Duquesne, in the Pennsylvania colony;
Montcalm was too weak to hold it and the other places too, and it
succeeded. One was against Louisbourg, the fortress France had
built at immense expense on Cape Breton Island to hold the mouths
of the St. Lawrence. It was under Amherst and the Admiral Boscawen
who had begun the war, and after a long and incidented siege, it
succeeded, too. The French lost not only their stronghold, but five
battleships in the harbor. The third was led by Abercrombie against
Ticonderoga; Abercrombie tried a frontal assault and failed, with
the loss of 2,000 men.

II

Two successes out of three was still a respectable result. The
grip of the French cordon had been sensibly loosened, and some of
the glitter rubbed off Montcalm. But Pitt had now advanced to a
wider concept than merely breaking the cordon; for 1759 he meant
the destruction of France in America. Abercrombie was replaced by
Amherst, who had demonstrated that he was a capable, if not very
rapidly moving, soldier; he was to head the colonial forces against
Ticonderoga and then down the Richelieu. But the main blow would be
amphibious, delivered straight across the Atlantic against the
heart of the enemy installations at Quebec. A fleet of twenty ships
of the line was assigned, under Admiral Charles Saunders, some of
them already on station out of Halifax under Rear Admiral Philip
Durell, who was to blockade the St. Lawrence till the blow fell.
The land forces were about 9,000 men under Brigadier James
Wolfe.

He was a curious character, only thirty-two years old at the
time, with a long, upturned nose, an amateur of the arts, as ardent
as Montcalm himself. Wolfe had been the inspiration of the siege of
Louisbourg and wrote angry letters home when it was not at once
followed up by a push on Quebec. The Duke of Newcastle, technically
head of the administration, was horrified at the disregard of
precedent and seniorities shown by Wolfe’s appointment, and told
George II the man was mad—to which His Majesty, who did not
want a certain wit on occasions, replied, "Mad, is he? Then I
hope he will bite some others of my generals." All Wolfe’s
subordinate commanders were under thirty; "it was a campaign of
boys." Wolfe and Saunders sailed from Spithead on February 17 to
meet the rest at Louisbourg; the attack was to be a surprise.

But it was not a surprise. Durell had failed in his blockade,
and before the British fleet reached Louisbourg, a French squadron
was at Quebec with reinforcements and, what was much more
important, a letter from Amherst, intercepted at sea, which gave
the whole plan away. Montcalm was horribly hampered by the
highhanded and incompetent Vaudreuil, and surrounded by such
peculations that he could write, "Everybody appears to be in a
hurry to make his fortune before the colony is lost." But the
intercepted letter gave him a chance. He secured from Vaudreuil
"provisional authority" to command all forces. Instead of
concentrating toward Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, as the
British expected, he sent only a detachment there, while himself
preparing to hold Quebec with his main body, now something over
10,000 men, including the militia.

The northern bank of the St. Lawrence is very high and
precipitous; from the falls of the Montmorenci to above Cap Rouge
he covered the whole range with a line of redoubts and
entrenchments, most especially between the Montmorenci and the St.
Charles, which falls in at Quebec town. Floating batteries were
established at the mouth of the St. Charles. The French ships were
sent far upstream; their gunners came down to help man the
batteries.

Landings below the Montmorenci, Montcalm did not fear; he could
stop any advance at that stream. Landings above he feared still
less; it would be impossible for ships in sufficient number to work
up the river in support, and if they did and the men landed, they
would be in just the kind of forest country most suitable for the
French type of operation. There were some fireships and gunboats;
Quebec held 106 guns, and was fairly immune to direct attack. By
October fogs and gales would drive from the St. Lawrence any
English ships that dared to enter it, and when they went, the
troops must go too, for the essence of amphibious operation is that
it must depend upon seaborne supply.

Considering that Montcalm had inferior numbers and many of his
troops could not be trusted in offensive operations in the open, it
was an excellent plan. The leading defect was that there were not
enough men to hold all the entrenchments solidly.

III

On June 9 the fleet entered the river, as bold a stroke as ever
struck, for battleships had never before come that far through the
fogs, rocks, and eddies that haunt the St. Lawrence. On the
twenty-sixth Wolfe landed with his chief engineer on the Ile
d’Orleans to survey his problem, with a great many of the troops
following. His plan had been to land on the north bank at Beauport,
then push across the St. Charles into the rear of the fortress, but
a glance told him this would never do; not only did guns on the
heights rake the projected landing area, but it was composed of
extensive mud flats with more batteries behind them. Two nights
later the French tried their fireships, loaded not only with
combustibles, but rockets, bombs, and grenades. The night was
pitch-dark, but all the French got out of it was a rather
spectacular show of fireworks; the ships were set alight too soon,
and those that offered any real danger were grappled and towed
ashore by imperturbable British sailors.

At Point Levis, opposite the city, the river is less than a mile
wide; Wolfe opened batteries here to bombard the town under cover
of one of his brigades, Monckton’s. With the other two he effected
a landing east of the mouth of the Montmorenci, for an effort to
bruise a passage across that stream. Quebec is terraced from the
heights down to the water; the Point Levis batteries soon tore to
bits everything that did not burn, sending the inhabitants into
huts in the fields, and under cover of the gunfire
Sutherland, 50, and a frigate were shot through into the
upper river. Montcalm was forced to detach 600 men to Cap Rouge in
case the ships were there to cover a landing. The over-all French
position could be regarded as unstable; food was short in their
lines, except with Vaudreuil and the higher civil officers, who
were living on pen-fattened chickens, while the rest had enough to
do to get gruel. Many of the Canadian militia were deserting; they
were perfectly willing to turn out for a raid, but not to take the
discipline of a campaign.

It has been a matter of speculation why Montcalm did not sift
his light forces through the woods on the upper Montmorenci for an
attack on Wolfe’s left flank, where "a Canadian in the woods is
worth three disciplined soldiers." One answer is that a couple of
nights after Monckton’s brigade was established around the Point
Levis batteries some of the Canadians tried this trick for
themselves against him, landing west of the point for a night
attack; they panicked and accomplished nothing. The other and more
complete answer is that Montcalm was content to play a waiting
game. Wolfe had declared that he would have Quebec if he had to
stay till November, but with every tick of the clock the date of
storms and ice drew nearer, and no real progress, while the whole
back country was filled with Indians, who picked off sentries and
patrols.

The English were thus compelled by meteorology to break through
somewhere, reach the high ground within the entrenched camp, and on
July 31, Wolfe tried, just west of the mouth of the Montmorenci. At
the base of the heights there the French had built a series of
redoubts. Wolfe conceived that if he attacked them frontally, the
French would come down from their summits and he would have the
open battle he wanted. On the morning in question ships were moved
in to give the place a long naval bombardment; when the tide went
out to leave wide flats, the attack was launched from boats.

It was a dismal failure. The grenadier regiment in the lead made
its rush without orders and without waiting for the rest; the
French calmly abandoned their redoubts at the base of the cliff and
shot the English down from the fortifications above, which were so
high that they had not been at all damaged by the artillery
preparation. Wolfe lost 450 men, most of them scalped by Montcalm’s
Indians, and he would have lost more but for a torrential storm of
rain that wet all the powder. In the French lines "everybody
thought the campaign as good as ended." It was true that Amherst
had entered the strategic situation by forcing the French out of
Ticonderoga, but he was still a long way from the St. Lawrence, and
Montcalm sent his best officer, the Chevalier de Levis, to Montreal
for the defense.

There is a hiatus in the story at this point. Wolfe had a new
plan for getting onto the high ground behind the city, but he told
no one who recorded it, and in the meanwhile sent one of his
brigadiers on a raid upstream to the Richelieu River and himself
embarked on a perfectly deliberate campaign of burning out the
countryside to force more desertions among the Canadians. He was
despondent; in August he fell ill and lay incommunicado for a
week.

In the meanwhile the British, always active on water, had been
sending light ships and flat-bottomed boats through into the upper
river, and Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, Saunders’ second, had gone
up to command them. This did not passed unnoticed in Montcalm’s
camp; he assigned Louis Antoine de Bougainville, later one of the
most famous of navigators and a senator under Napoleon, to watch
this force with 1,500 men. Holmes amused himself and drove
Bougainville to distraction by keeping his motley squadron together
and drifting with the tide, up and down, up and down, firing from
time to time and occasionally embarking troops, compelling the
French to march back and forth to keep pace with him. As soon as
Wolfe was out of bed, the admiral and the brigadiers urged him to
try a night landing between Cap Rouge and Quebec. He caught up the
idea, and on August 31 ordered the abandonment of the lines on the
Montmorenci, everything to be concentrated at Point Levis. Wolfe
himself reconnoitered the chosen spot, a cove named Anse du Foulon.
The difficulty would be to hit it in the dark and with the tide
running.

Montcalm had not missed the troop movement. He wrote to
Bougainville, urging him not to let Holmes get out of sight, but on
the afternoon of September 11, Saunders moved his big ships up
toward Beauport and began firing and lowering boats. News of this
apparent landing attempt affected Bougainville; when the tide began
to ebb at two in the morning, he let his weary men rest instead of
following Holmes down. Wolfe’s expedition silently joined the
drifters, twenty-four men in the leading boat, with Wolfe himself,
who in a low tone recited Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard as far as "The paths of glory lead but to the
grave," and said, "Gentlemen, I would rather have written those
lines than take Quebec tomorrow."

Twice they were hailed by French sentries, but each time a
French-speaking Highlander gave the right word. The tide carried
them a quarter of a mile beyond the destined landing spot,
but this turned out to be good luck, for the only path where they
could have mounted from the cove had a barricade and a post on it.
The twenty-four pulled themselves up the steep by tree roots and
bushes, and took the post in the rear with a few shots and a shout;
the path was cleared and the English began to climb, while boats
passed and repassed to bring those who had not been embarked at
first. By daybreak slightly less than 5,000 English had formed line
of battle across the bush-starred Plains of Abraham, west of the
city.

Within it, and especially in the high command, there was a good
deal of confusion. Montcalm, concentrated opposite Saunders at
Beauport, began marching for the plain as soon as he heard of the
landing, but Vaudreuil insisted that this was a feint, and would
not release the men holding the lines from Beauport to the
Montmorenci; nor would the Governor of Quebec give up the
twenty-five field guns Montcalm wanted. Still, with what he had,
about 5,000 men, approximately the same number as the English, he
advanced to the attack, which was now his only resource—for
if he so much as waited for Bougainville or Vaudreuil, the English
would dig themselves in, and they were between him and his sources
of supply.

Montcalm advanced, then, with five regular regiments, three
guns, and his front covered by a cloud of Canadian militia, who lay
among the bushes as sharpshooters. They did some damage, including
wounding Wolfe in the wrist; but he made his own men lie down and
not rise until the French came cheering within 130 yards, somewhat
disordered by passing their skirmishers. Wolfe had trained those
men himself, on lines learned from the Prussian Friedrich, and he
had them under close control. They stood there while the French
came marching and firing forward until the enemy were within forty
yards, then let go with a volley so coordinated that it sounded
like a single cannon shot, advanced four paces and fired again, and
then again. Within fifteen minutes it was all over, the French
flying in disorganized groups, with many killed and Montcalm
mortally wounded.

So was Wolfe; two bullets went through him and he lived just
long enough to hear the French were running and remark, "Now God be
praised, I die in peace." Quebec surrendered five days later,
and though the decapitated snake writhed for a while, the French
dominion of Canada was ended.

IV

But it was not exclusively ended on the Plains of Abraham. It
was not because in December 1758 there had come to the head of
affairs in Paris, Louis Etienne, Duc de Choiseul, who had the
double advantage of being a great favorite of La Pompadour (he was
so much of a gallant that even Casanova admired his amorous
exploits), and a man of both drive and ideas, quite different from
the lazy pedants who had preceded him. When he reached power,
Rossbach had been fought, Canada was going, and India almost gone.
Choiseul realized that it was eleven o’clock and only by the
boldest throw could the game be won. He prepared the boldest of
possible throws—the invasion of England by 50,000 men.

By at least one historian the plan has been called crackbrained;
within terms of the means available it was nothing of the kind, and
Napoleon Bonaparte, who was assuredly not crackbrained about
military matters, adopted an inferior version of it in 1805. Troops
were collected in the Austrian Netherlands, Normandy, and at Vannes
in the Morbihan. Thurot, the gallant sea raider, was to take a
squadron out of Dunkirk, sail north; this would draw off some
British strength. Admiral de la Clue, with the Toulon battle fleet,
was to pass Gibraltar and sail for the Morbihan. As soon as weather
permitted, he would be joined by Admiral Conflans with the Brest
fleet; they would sail together, covering a convoy for the south of
England, then pick the troops in the Netherlands and land them on
the Clyde. Sentiment for the exiled house of Stuart was still a
force in Scotland, and it was less than fifteen years since Bonnie
Prince Charlie almost won. The over-all objective was not so much
conquest as the attainment of a bargaining position for the peace
table.

It was true that both De la Clue and Conflans were watched by
superior British squadrons. But they were watched from a distance,
the squadrons were not much superior, and the conditions under
which sailing ships operated must be remembered. A heavy easterly
gale, not unusual in the Mediterranean, would drive De la Clue’s
ships through without possibility of interruption. A strong
westerly gale, common in the English Channel, would hold British
blockaders to their usual base in Torbay, while the configuration
of Brest was such that Conflans could work out against it, using
the same wind to reach the Morbihan. Once there, once the
transports were picked up, Conflans was to fight his way through,
no matter what happened to his warships. In 1747, Commodore
L’Etenduere lost six of his fleet of nine of the line to an English
fleet of fourteen, but assured the safety of a convoy of 252.

The De la Clue part of the plan worked very ill. In August, when
he tried to run Gibraltar, some of his ships missed orders and put
into Cadiz, while the rest were caught off Lagos by that Boscawen
who began the war and almost totally destroyed. This neither
prevented nor discouraged the operation of Conflans, who had
twenty-one line-of-battle ships against the twenty-five of Sir
Edward Hawke, who was charged with watching him from Torbay.

This Hawke was a tall, strong, broad-faced man, who has left an
impress on history by his actions, but almost none by his
personality. He had indulged in the singularly dangerous pursuit of
speaking against Pitt in Parliament, and the great minister did not
like him, but George II did, and made the retention of the admiral
in command a personal obstinacy. Since Hawke’s war record was
outstanding—it was he who had captured L’Etenduere’s six
ships in ’47—Pitt was forced to give way.

The ships of 1759 were not copper-bottomed, and readily became
so foul that they lost speed. It was thus the general custom of the
age to fit out a squadron for a specific operation, then bring it
home and clean house before starting again. Hawke was well informed
on French intentions, and very early realized that this normal
procedure would be playing the game exactly as the French wanted
it. Even if he caught up with their fleet in the Channel, even if
he beat them, it would not be hard for them to slip the convoy
through—as the convoy of 1747 had got away. The only valid
answer was to prevent the convoy from sailing under cover of
Conflans’ fleet, and the only sure method of accomplishing this was
to keep fleet and convoy from assembling at the same place.

Hawke therefore kept the main body of his fleet in Torbay, where
they could be quickly careened for bottom-scraping; off the exits
to Brest he stationed four or five heavy ships, and off those to
the Morbihan he placed Commodore Robert Duff, with four fifty-gun
ships, two-deckers midway between a line-of-battle ship and a
cruising frigate, both squadrons having instructions to whistle him
up at once if the enemy began to move. It was an outrageously
expensive procedure to keep so many ships at sea, and Hawke heard
himself denounced in Parliament for wasting the king’s guineas. A
gale drove one battleship on the rocks off Brest; another became so
leaky that she had to be retired from service; two of the fifties
fouled up and had to go home; but all that summer and early fall
the guard was maintained, and when he was criticized, Hawke replied
only, "By the grace of God, we will give a good account of
them."

There must, nevertheless, have been a considerable degree of
strain and short temper in the Channel fleet that summer, while
Wolfe toiled with the problem of reaching the heights behind
Quebec. It would be sometime in October that news of the Canadian
success came, and the windows were illuminated, but it had grown to
November 15 and the season of autumnal gales when the light frigate
Gibraltar, 24, came bursting into Torbay with the news that
Conflans was out, 21 of the line, twenty-four leagues off Belle
Isle, steering southeast.

The wear of service had cut Hawke’s battle line to twenty-three,
many of them smaller and less well found than those of the French,
although he had four of the giant three-deckers that were like
floating fortresses in a sea fight. He sailed at once for the
Morbihan, sure that they were thither bound. The wind came in south
by east and held Hawke westward for days; it was the nineteenth
before the breeze turned fair and he could crack on sail.

Next morning early a frigate firing signal guns ran in on
Commodore Duff, at anchor inside Belle-Ile-sur-Quiberon with his
fifties. It took him no time at all to realize that the French were
on him in force; he ordered cables cut and made all sail for the
south passage out, but the enemy came down so fast that his dullest
sailer was almost under the guns of their leader, a little west and
south of the island and the entrance to Quiberon Bay, when they
suddenly abandoned the chase. Duff held his course and was out of
it; the French bore before the wind for the bay, where there are
numerous rocks, shoals, and intricate passages well known to them,
but unknown to Hawke’s ships, which they had seen in pursuit. All
morning long the west wind freshened toward gale, with frequent
heavy squalls.

This westerly stormwind pushed the heavy British ships along
fast, rolling their lower-deck ports under and sending men
staggering by life lines across the decks. They held on, Hawke
flying signals from his flag that each ship should engage as it
came up, not waiting to form. At two in the afternoon
Warspite, 74, and Devonshire, 70, were in range of
the rear ships of the rather confused French and opened fire; a
little later seven other British ships were in action. Shot from
one of them partly dismasted the French Formidable, 80, and
each Briton fired into her as she passed; at four she struck, with
200 dead, including an admiral.

It was now falling dusk on a wild tossing sea among the shoals
and rocks, British and French mixed in a mad combat against weather
and each other. Hawke had no pilots but, reasoning that the enemy
would serve him that purpose if he stayed close aboard them, held
right on into night and storm. The French Thesee, 74,
foundered when she opened her lower-deck ports against the English
Torbay, 74, and 780 men went down with her; Torbay
almost shared her fate. The French Superbe, 70, sank
likewise; Heros, 74, struck just as she crashed on the
rocks; Soleil Royal, 80, Conflans’ flag, was so surrounded
that she had to be beached and burned.

In the last of light, in the rising seas, Hawke made the signal
to anchor. Morning showed that he had lost two of his battleships,
wrecked on the inhospitable shores of Quiberon. But seven of the
French twenty-one were gone and the remainder were driven up the
little rivers, Charente and Vilaine in two groups, aground, unable
to unite, all damaged, never to emerge.

V

Quiberon Bay was the crowning achievement of that annus
mirabilis, 1759, when, as Macauley says, "Men woke up to ask
each other what new victory there was that morning." It was
the justification of William Pitt, who made England an empire. The
importance of the fall of Quebec and the ejection of the French
from Canada needs no comment; the subsequent history of the
American continent is its product. But it does need to be noticed
that Quebec without Quiberon Bay decided nothing. In the previous
war the New England colonists had valiantly taken Louisbourg, but
it had to be given back at the peace table to recoup British losses
elsewhere. Quiberon Bay made permanent the result of Quebec,
decided that Choiseul would never attain his bargaining position.
He would live to be an old man and somewhat recover France from her
doldrums; but after Quiberon Bay the question was no longer which
nation should dominate the seas and the empires, but how far
England could be restrained.

Something else of the greatest importance had happened. Sir
Edward Hawke had invented blockade; the idea of not meeting an
enemy’s overseas expedition with another expedition, but of closely
watching his ports at whatever cost, whatever strain, and
clobbering him as soon as he came out. The concept of blockade and
such questions as enemy goods in neutral bottoms go back at least
as far as Hugo Grotius, but no one ever before had thought of a
blockade that prevented all ingress and egress of whatever nature;
in technical terms, a close blockade. Boscawen watched De la Clue’s
Toulon fleet from the distance of Gibraltar, but Hawke watched
Conflans from the distance of his doorstep. And this idea of close
blockade was to dominate the story of war on the waters of the
world for at least 200 years.

13.
WHY THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION SUCCEEDED

I

When the troubles began in Boston in 1775, the Secretary of
State for Colonies was Lord George Germain. He was a gay dog of an
Anglo-Irishman, haughty and domineering, who had taken up the army
as a career, and remained in it till the Battle of Minden in 1759,
where he commanded the cavalry. When a charge of English foot broke
the French line, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, who led the
Anglo-Prussian forces, three times ordered Lord George to charge to
turn the victory into a rout, and he three times refused to do
anything of the kind. For this he was pronounced "unfit to serve
His Majesty in any military capacity whatsoever." The order was
entered in every regimental book, and a black cloak of cowardice
was draped round him—somewhat unjustly, for there seems to
have been nothing wrong with his personal courage; he had fought in
battles before and been wounded. He was simply in a bad mood that
day.

Still, he was cordially hated in the army, and in addition he
knew nothing of its problems in the woods and vast reaches of
America, nor cared to know. Whatever energies, whatever abilities
he possessed flowed into politics, society, and the gaming table.
It was vitally important to cry banco! and to maintain that balance
among the forces represented by the king, the city, and the ruling
gentry, on whom the administration rested. The conduct of affairs
in the revolting colonies fell into his department, but he began by
regarding it as a kind of police operation against mere rioters,
and neglected everything he could possibly put aside.

There was thus no mobilization of energies into great
thunderclouds that discharged destructive bolts of lightning, as
with Pitt, no call to the national spirit. A good half of the
soldiers for the police operation were rented from the minor
princes of Germany. Lord George never learned that General Sir
William Howe, his leading commander in America, had suffered a
psychic block as the result of the Battle of Bunker Hill. That
celebrated action was correctly counted a British victory, but Howe
lost nearly half the storming party that participated, and he never
again dared attack American sharpshooters in position. At Long
Island, Harlem Heights, White Plains, he might easily have
destroyed the Continental forces opposed to him by bold assault;
instead he maneuvered, and George Washington’s little army survived
to slash back hard at Trenton.

To Germain, Trenton was merely an "unhappy affair." He had
little concept of the king of man Howe was up against, and in
February 1777 there came to him Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne,
dramatist and commander in Canada, with a plan of campaign for the
year. It called for Burgoyne himself to move up the Richelieu and
the lakes, Howe up the Hudson to meet him at Albany, splitting the
colonies, and holding the split open by a chain of blockhouses. The
conquest of New England would then be easy; it would be isolated
from the sources of the supply in the west. While this was being
discussed, there arrived a letter from Howe with his own plan; he
proposed a column from Rhode Island to reduce Boston, a second to
ascend the Hudson to Albany and there meet a force under Burgoyne,
and a third to deal with Washington. For this plan he needed a
reinforcement of 15,000 men.

It was characteristic of Germain that he accepted both plans
except for the single detail of the 15,000 additional men for Howe;
that would throw his budget out of gear. He could spare only 2,000
reinforcements; and this would probably not be enough for Howe to
carry out the full three-column plan. Therefore he dictated a
letter to Howe saying that the Rhode Island-Boston project could be
conveniently dropped, and of the other two, the Hudson River move
was the more vital. If Sir William did not feel himself strong
enough both to make it and to follow Washington, the Hudson should
have precedence, a positive order. It was also characteristic of
Germain that he was in a hurry to make a previous appointment for a
country weekend, and went off without signing the letter. It was
never sent.

Howe thus learned nothing but that he would not have all the men
he needed for his three-pronged offensive. On the ground and in
fighting contact with the Americans, he had quite other opinions
than those entertained by Germain in London, and one of them was
that General George Washington was the most dangerous man on the
Continent. If Howe could not execute all his projects, that of
dealing with Washington must have first place. Besides, he had an
American prisoner, a general named Charles Lee, who assured him
that the middle colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania would return
to their allegiance if the royal standard were raised there. Howe
therefore cut the Hudson expedition to a raid, boarded his
transports, and sailed for the Chesapeake.

The details of the campaigns that followed are often confused,
but the main lines are simple. Howe beat Washington in battles at
Brandywine and Germantown, and took the colonial capital of
Philadelphia, a stroke that would have been decisive. Here it was
decisive also, but in the contrary sense. For while Howe was
beating Washington but failing to destroy his army, thanks to that
psychic block, something perfectly dreadful happened to Burgoyne. A
diversionary force that was to join him by way of Oswego failed to
deliver, and was driven back with loss. Burgoyne took Ticonderoga
and reached the head of the lakes without too much difficulty, but
then found himself involved in a campaign in dense woods against
woodsmen who every hour increased in number and in the intensity of
their attacks. Their rifles were slow-loading, but very accurate
and of a range far superior to the British muskets; and volley fire
was no use against them.

Burgoyne’s supply and transport problems became practically
insoluble. It took him twenty days to cover less than that number
of miles to the upper waters of the Hudson. When he sent a strong
foraging party into the valley of Vermont in quest of provision, it
was practically wiped out at Bennington in a battle that enormously
raised American morale. By the date when the British reached the
neighborhood of Saratoga, the Americans were much stronger than
they. The Continental Congress, which had about as much military
sense as Lord George Germain, placed a "fussy old midwife" named
Horatio Gates in command of its army, but they gave him the fiery
Benedict Arnold as a second. When Burgoyne attempted to solve his
difficulties by a battle on September 19, 1777, he was thrown back
with the loss of a third of those engaged. Word drifted in that the
Americans had taken the posts in the British rear and
communications with Canada were cut. Burgoyne tried another battle
on October 7, and was surrounded when Arnold led a charge that
broke his flank. His whole army surrendered ten days later.

The fighting at Saratoga was decisive in one sense. It not only
marked the failure of the Burgoyne plan and the loss of his army,
it also decided the French court that the clandestine aid being
given to the revolters should be converted into active alliance
with a nation which had established its independence. Troops and
fleets would help the colonists, and the theater of conflict was
swung round the zones from the West Indies to the coasts of India.
One must never forget India.

II

The French navy that entered the war in 1778 was a far different
organism from the one whose failures caused the loss of Canada.
Choiseul started it; he wanted a fleet that could meet the British
on equal terms, and he spared neither trouble nor expense in
setting it up. A naval academy was organized, the calibers of guns
were standardized, and a corps of gunners established along the
lines of the land artillery service; the civil housekeeping
officers lost their former control of the movement of ships; new
regulations prescribed that admirals, captains, lieutenants, and
midshipmen should dine with each other; the best engineers of
France were sought out to improve the breed of ships, and did so to
an astonishing degree.

The French are peculiarly ready to take fire when a powder train
of this sort is ignited, and something like a wave of national
enthusiasm for the navy swept over the country on the heels of
Choiseul’s reforms. The estates of the various provinces donated
ships, the city of Paris a huge three-decker, and the associated
tax farmers a whole squadron—which, incidentally, they could
very well afford. By 1770, Choiseul felt his new navy was strong
enough in spirit and force for a war of revenge against perfidious
Albion, and he wanted to try it; Louis XV disagreed, and the
minister was dismissed.

But he had been given twelve years in which to build the new
structure, and it stayed built. Moreover, when Louis XVI came to
the throne in 1774, France had a head of state who was really
interested in naval matters; and when she entered the war on the
side of the colonies in 1778, there were not Continental
commitments to distract her attention. It should, however, be noted
that the French idea of naval strategy was by no means the same as
the English. In French thinking the basic purpose of naval war was
not to be an end in itself, to assure control of the sea for
purposes of commerce and everything else that could be moved by
water, but to support definite, specific operations ashore. This
has been condemned by Mahan as false strategy, and he was doubtless
right, but in the hands of such ships and seamen as those of the
French naval revival, it could lead to results.

The first of these results followed close on the heels of the
alliance. Comte d’Estaing sailed for the Chesapeake with twelve
battleships, and forced Admiral Lord Howe, brother of the general,
to take his smaller fleet out of there. That meant the army would
have to go too, and Sir Henry Clinton, who had succeeded Howe in
command of it, made his way back to New York, not without a battle
at Monmouth, which ended in no decision, in spite of some heroic
swearing by Washington at generals who were not executing his
orders in the way he wished.

The British now held only New York and Newport, Rhode Island,
and if they were to make any progress in putting down the
rebellion, needed a new plan of campaign. Germain conceived one for
transporting troops by sea and working up through the weak southern
colonies to Virginia and Maryland. There were three basic
assumptions behind this plan. One of them was correct: that the
French were more interested in the rich West Indies than in
supporting American operations on the continent, and would send
fleets thither only for brief campaigns, while the British could
afford to maintain a permanent American squadron and move troops
along the coast at will. The second assumption seemed to be
correct: that there were no solid American forces in the South, and
regular British troops could deal with anything there. The third
assumption was never to be tested: that if Georgia, the Carolinas,
and Virginia were overrun, "all America to the south of the
Susquehanna would return to its allegiance"—a phrase which
had an invincible attraction for Lord George Germain.

In accordance with the first two assumptions a force was
dispatched to Savannah, which took that place with ease,
practically subdued Georgia, defeated General Benjamin Lincoln
without difficulty, and marched into South Carolina. Considerable
maneuvering followed, but the essential feature of the campaign was
that on May 12, 1780, Clinton himself took Charleston with
Lincoln’s whole army of over 5,000 men, the worst disaster suffered
by the American arms, and a fair set-off for Saratoga.

During the previous fall d’Estaing and his fleet had briefly
reappeared from the West Indies, and been roundly beaten in an
attempt to recover Savannah. Atop this, General Lord Cornwallis,
whom Clinton left at Charleston with 8,500 men while himself
returning to New York, marched into the Carolina upcountry. At
Camden on August 16, 1780, he virtually destroyed the American
southern army, which had been placed in charge of Old Midwife
Gates. Sumter, the partisan leader, was surprised in his camp at
night and his force wiped out, too. British posts held down the
whole countryside, and Germain’s campaign was a thing of
genius.

But the British now found themselves in the presence of a master
spirit. To replace Gates, Washington sent to the South his
quartermaster general, Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker who
had been ejected from that society over his interest in military
affairs. At Charlotte, where he assumed command of the wreckage
from Camden, he found 1,482 men, with equipment for 800; but he was
a man who could perfectly analyze a situation and who knew exactly
what he wanted to do. His advantage lay in the converse of
Germain’s third assumption: that wherever any small core of regular
American fighting men appeared enough local assistance would rally
round to make things impossible for lesser British detachments,
while a major British force could continually be dogged.

The campaign that followed was the classic example of how small
war should be waged. There was an incident at King’s Mountain,
where a group of backwoodsmen swarmed out of nowhere to annihilate
a force of 1,100 British and Tory militia, and another at Cowpens,
where Daniel Morgan of the famous Rifles nearly wiped out another
British detachment. But the real weight of the campaign was in the
marchings and maneuvers all through North Carolina, in which
Cornwallis tried to pin the elusive Greene down for a fight, and in
the work of the partisans in the background. It lasted all winter
long. On March 15, 1781, Greene at last gave the British leader his
battle at Guilford Court House. Cornwallis won it, but when it was
over he found himself with no supplies, more wounded than he had
wagons for, and a distance of 260 miles between him and his base.
He left the wounded behind and, in order not to give an appearance
of throwing up the campaign, made for the coast at Wilmington,
which was still in North Carolina, under the wing of the Royal
Navy.

Greene marched off to try his bag of tricks on the forces
Cornwallis had left to hold South Carolina.

III

The importance of Greene’s campaign lay in its effect on the
mind of Lord George Germain. There was nobody to tell him that the
remainder of the British army in the South was being subjected to a
process of extraordinary and destructive erosion. In his view
resistance in the Carolinas was practically over. Cornwallis had
marched where he pleased through the states and won a battle over a
force that could not now be much more than a disorderly rabble.
Throughout the criss-cross of correspondence between the minister,
Clinton at New York, and Cornwallis at Wilmington, with all sorts
of suggestions and changes of detail, there runs the fixed idea
that the South being now in strong hands, the British purpose
should be the establishment of a solid naval station on the
Chesapeake as a prelude to the reduction of Virginia. For that
matter, Cornwallis himself did not regard the Carolina campaign as
a failure, only thought that "until Virginia is in a manner
subdued, our hold of the Carolines must be difficult."

He marched to Virginia then, in the spring of 1781, picked up a
detachment that had been operating in the area and, with
reinforcements from Clinton bringing him up to over 7,000 men,
began to look for his naval base. Opposing him was Washington’s
friend, the young French volunteer, the Marquis de Lafayette, with
strength so limited he dared not risk battle. Cornwallis tried to
bring him to book and failed, as with Greene; and was engaged in an
intricate correspondence which contained continual changes of plan,
with the letters taking from six weeks to three months to reach
destination. The essential feature that emerges is that, after
investigating the Hampton Roads-Portsmouth area, Cornwallis decided
that the facing positions of York and Gloucester on the river of
the former name would be the best station for ships of the line,
and in the closing days of July established himself there and
fortified.

It was about the same date that there arrived in Washington’s
camp outside New York a reinforcement of four strong regiments of
French infantry with artillery and engineers under the Comte de
Rochambeau. He came overland from Narragansett Bay, having been
convoyed in by Admiral de Barras, with eight of the line; and
Barras bore word that the main French battle fleet, twenty-five to
twenty-nine ships, would operate on the American coast sometime
that summer, the fleet of De Grasse. There was a British fleet in
the West Indies, with which De Grasse had engaged in an indecisive
action. But now he not only had the more ships, the British must
see their huge summer sugar convoy to England; he was confident
that he could slip their vigilance.

Since the beginning of the war Washington had not ceased to
insist on how British control of the sea permitted them to strike
where they pleased. "The amazing advantage the Enemy derive from
their ships and the command of the Water keeps us in a state of
constant perplexity," he wrote as early as 1777. Nor since the
forging of the French alliance had he relaxed his efforts to obtain
the help of a fleet. "A constant naval superiority on these coasts
is the object most interesting," he set down in 1780; but
Versailles was interested in the sugar islands. Now, however, De
Grasse was coming; the point was where should he come?

Washington’s own taste had been for an attack on New York, and
he submitted the idea of De Grasse as one of three possible plans;
but the more he considered it, the less good it looked. The British
had eight ships of the line under Admiral Thomas Graves on the New
York station. It would be very difficult for even a largely
superior squadron to beat into New York Harbor against these and
the forts. On the land side Clinton now commanded 16,000 men; even
with the three additional regiments De Grasse was bringing,
Washington would have less, and would be faced with the problem of
crossing a river against fortified lines.

There is one thing to be remembered about George Washington. He
has received so much admiration for constancy and character that he
is in danger of becoming a plaster saint. General Howe was
perfectly right in regarding Washington as one of the deadliest
military opponents in history. His instrument was often weak or
flawed; but there runs a consistent strain through every campaign
in which he was involved, every battle he ever fought. He made no
effort to maneuver the enemy out of position, but sought to
destroy, to annihilate; and under the conditions of the American
Revolution this only had to be achieved once or twice. After
Saratoga the British hold on the northern colonies was gone; and
since calculation showed there was no very good chance of wiping
out Clinton in New York, the decision was for annihilation on the
shore of the Chesapeake. De Grasse replied that he would leave the
Indies for that area on August 13 with ships and troops; would
remain until October 15, when he must return. He would be perfectly
at Washington’s disposition until the latter date.

The commander of the British fleet in the West Indies was Sir
George Brydges Rodney, and he was one of the greatest seamen in
English history, but that summer he made a serious miscalculation.
On July 5 one of his frigates reported that De Grasse had been seen
coming out of Port Royal Bay of Martinique with twenty-seven sail
of the line and 200 merchantmen, the latter being the French summer
sugar convoy. There had been some intelligence that they intended
summer operations off the North American coast, and to Rodney it
was perfectly clear what this movement meant. De Grasse was going
to send a detachment to cooperate with the Barras squadron at
Newport against New York, while with his main body he covered the
passage of the sugar convoy. To provide against this Rodney
detached fourteen sail of the line under Sir Samuel Hood, his best
fighting junior, to join Graves at New York; this would give the
latter twenty-two battleships, superior to anything the French
could assemble. Rodney himself sailed for home with his own sugar
ships. He did not know that the French merchantmen had gone back to
Port Royal to wait until November, or that De Grasse with his whole
fleet had slipped up the Old Bahama Channel, north of Cuba, south
of the Bahamas; nobody used that route. He did know that Hood
detested Graves, but as he hated the man himself and you cannot
always choose your bedfellows in the service, this did not seem
important.

On August 21, Washington and Rochambeau crossed the Hudson at
King’s Ferry and began one of the great marches of history, leaving
only General Heath with 2,500 men opposite Clinton’s 16,000.
Twenty-eight days later, through a country of unmetaled roads or no
roads at all, with utterly inadequate transport, Washington had
covered 400 miles and was on the Chesapeake, joining Lafayette and
the troops just brought be De Grasse, and closing his jaws around
Cornwallis.

When Hood reached New York and anchored outside Sandy Hook,
Clinton was still uncertain that Washington and Rochambeau were
after Cornwallis, but he had reliable intelligence that Barras had
sailed from Newport with eight battleships, eighteen transports,
and a siege train. This situation might be dangerous to Cornwallis.
Graves came out with the only five ships he had in sailing
condition and the combined squadron of nineteen made for the
Chesapeake. Toward noon on September 5, Graves raised the entrance
of Cape Henry and found De Grasse coming out to meet him, with
twenty-four battleships in line.

IV

Admiral Thomas Graves was certainly not the type of man who
would invent gunpowder, and he had nineteen ships against the
French twenty-four, but he was a British sea dog and he knew
precisely what to do in the presence of an enemy who was
threatening something vital—fight a battle. He had the
weather gauge, the wind on his side, as the French formed a rather
straggling line east from Cape Henry, and he bore down on them from
the northward. The signals he hung out from his flagship
London, 98, midway along the line were for "Close action"
and "Line ahead at half a cable."

The fatal words were "Line ahead." There existed in the British
navy of that date something called the Fighting Instructions; in
the most decided terms they prescribed that when a line of battle
had been formed every ship must follow directly in the wake of her
next ahead, and in 1756 an admiral had been court-martialed and
shot on his own quarterdeck ("pour encourager les autres,"
according to Voltaire) for having violated this absolute rule. When
the British leader, Shrewsbury, 74, bore down to engage
Pluton, 74, at the head of the French line, the rest of the
British ships followed her, head to tail, instead of making
directly for their French opposite numbers. The consequence was
that the British line came in on the French at an acute angle; the
leading ships were hotly engaged, those at the centers of the lines
very little, and those at the rear not at all.

The commander of the British rear division was that fighting
admiral, Sir Sam Hood, and it is possible that could have fallen on
the French rear, which was in some disorder. But he was not going
to break that signaled line ahead in violation of the Fighting
Instructions and expose himself to a court-martial in order to get
that fool Graves out of his difficulties; and he did not. When dark
closed over a mild swell, the French seamen gunners at the head of
the line had done so well that the British had three to two of
their losses and several ships badly battered, one of them so much
that she had to be burned a couple of days later.

Next morning Graves tried to close again, but the French kept
away across the entrance to the bay and the English battle cripples
fell behind. If Graves had had an anchorage where he could make
repairs, it might have been different, but it was De Grasse who
held the anchorage. Three days more they maneuvered, the French now
in possession of the weather gauge, thereby permitted to fight only
under conditions most favorable to themselves. On September 10,
Graves discovered that Barras had joined De Grasse, who now had
thirty-two battleships to his eighteen. These odds were too heavy
even for a British sea dog; Graves called a council of war to make
sure that nobody was going to criticize him seriously, then went
back to New York to repair damages.

On September 27, Washington’s army was assembled at
Williamsburg, 16,645 strong, nearly half French. Cornwallis has
been criticized by some military men for not trying to move past
him, but this ignores the question of where he was to go in a
completely hostile countryside, opposed by the fast-marching
Washington and French regular troops quite equal to his own in
numbers and training, plus some excellent French cavalry. Formal
siege operations were opened on September 29; the parallels were
vigorously pushed forward. Alexander Hamilton led a brilliant night
assault which took two redoubts, and the 24- and 18-pounder guns
brought by Barras pounded everything in sight. On the morning of
October 17, four years to the day after Burgoyne’s surrender, a
red-clad drummer mounted the Yorktown ramparts to beat the chamade,
and two days later Cornwallis and all his men marched out and gave
up their arms.

V

The effects of the success of the American Revolution have
received sufficient comment to need no more here. It was not only
the establishment of the new nation, but also the cradle of the
French Revolution. Yorktown decided a revolution ideological as
well as physical. But although Lord North threw up his hands and
cried, "Oh, my God, it is all over!" when he heard the news from
the Chesapeake, there were still points at which the decision could
be proved in reversible error, and if Frederick the Great’s was the
first of the world wars, that of the American Revolution was the
second.

An England victorious elsewhere in the circuit of the zones
could easily have built up Clinton’s forces in New York to attack
point, or enabled those in Charleston to undertake something else
than the quiet defense to which Greene’s operations presently
reduced them—even an England under the administration of Lord
North and George Germain.

The reasons why England did not make or even attempt an American
rally have been hidden behind the hurricane of events that blew
along the corridors of that second world war. Spain and Holland
joined France in August 1781, and while Washington was debating the
question of New York or Yorktown, there was a bloody dingdong
battle between British and Dutch off Dogger Bank which resulted in
a draw. The West Indies fighting reached a climax six months after
Yorktown in a battle off the Saintes. There Rodney took five French
ships of the line, including the three-decker flagship Ville de
Paris, 110, with De Grasse in person aboard, and so prevented
an attack on Jamaica, but by no means drove the French from the
islands. A year after Yorktown the Spaniards attacked Gibraltar
with ten huge floating batteries and the help of French troops, but
were foiled amid immense thunders, with the loss of all the
battering ships and 1,500 men.

The sum may be stated as defensive success and negative
decision. Some of the sugar islands changed hands and changed back
again, but the allies lacked the power and skill to drive home a
real offensive against the widespread British possessions, while
the British lacked resources to take the offensive themselves. Thus
the situation remained fairly static down to the late months of
1782, by which date the most serious of the allied attacks had been
beaten off, and it became possible for Britain to consider a
counterstroke in America or elsewhere. At this point there arrived
a piece of news that made it imperative to abandon the American
venture.

VI

One of the results of the Seven Years’ War had been the ejection
of the French from India, except for a few "factories," with which
communication was maintained through Mauritius, then called the Ile
de France. A smallish French squadron operated from there to India
under M. le Comte d’Orves; it was opposed by a British force of
approximately equal weight under another of the sea dogs, Sir
Edward Hughes. The British were having infinite trouble with Hyder
Ali, Sultan of Mysore, the only prince of India who ever beat them
in battle, but D’Orves refused to amalgamate the wars, or in any
way to help the sultan; was himself beaten in the manner of the
Seven Years’ War, and retreated to the Ile de France, while the
British snapped up French outposts.

Early in 1781, with things going pretty well for them
(Cornwallis had "conquered" the Carolinas and was getting ready to
move into Virginia), the British decided to improve their own
communications with India by seizing the Dutch colony at the Cape
of Good Hope. A squadron was fitted out under Commodore George
Johnstone, one seventy-four-gun battleship, a sixty-four, and three
of the fifty-gun intermediates so useful in colonial service, with
numerous transports, supply ships, and frigates. After operations
at Good Hope were completed, Johnstone was to move on and join
Hughes, giving him a sharp superiority over D’Orves.

The existence and purpose of this force were not hidden from the
French cabinet; on the same day that De Grasse sailed from the West
Indies on the voyage that was to take him to Yorktown, there left
Brest a squadron of two seventy-fours and three sixty-fours, with a
convoy of troops to reinforce Good Hope. Its commander was a newly
made rear admiral, Pierre Andre de Suffren, who had done some
service with the Knights of Malta and there acquired the title of
bailiff, bailli. In the Seven Years’ War he had been twice a
prisoner of the English and learned to dislike their arrogance; an
enormously fat man, ardent to the point of violence, filled with a
desire that was almost an obsession to restore the honor of the
French marine.

On the voyage down the latitudes one of his ships ran short of
water. He determined to put in at Porto Praya in the Cape Verdes to
fill up, and on the morning of April 16, Suffren arrived off the
harbor and found it full of English ships, Johnstone’s ships. These
were neutral waters, but it was in neutral waters that he had been
taken prisoner by the British in ’57; he hung out the red flag for
battle from his flagship, Heros, 74, and drove right in,
neglecting the British transports, anchoring in the middle of their
warships, and opening both broadsides. Unfortunately his own
captains were as much surprised as the British. Annibal, 74,
was not completely cleared for action; she came in boldly enough,
but fired ineffectually. The captain of Artesien, 64, was
killed by a musket ball at the first fire; she did not do much in
the confusion but carry a big Indiaman out. The other French ships
only marched through the roadstead, firing as they went, and after
an hour or so of it Suffren pulled out. At the mouth of the bay
Annibal’s masts went over the side.

Yet it was anything but a setback, anything but a failure.
Suffren had sent his convoy on ahead; now he got Annibal in
tow, formed line of battle in the offing, and waited for Johnstone
to come out. In the afternoon Johnstone did; the masts of one of
his own ships promptly crashed down from the damage they had
received, most of the others had been more or less hurt, the French
were down to leeward on a rising sea. If he followed them he might
not be able to get back to his convoy at all and would be involved
in a night battle against superior forces. He turned back,
therefore, and wrote a report speaking of the anguish of his cruel
situation.

As might be expected, the French were in full possession when he
reached the Cape; Johnstone sent three of his battleships on to
reinforce Hughes off India and turned back with the rest of the
convoy, expedition aborted. Suffren had to stay at the Cape for two
months while arrangements were made and his damaged Annibal
repaired; he reached Ile de France in October, just after Yorktown
surrendered. It was now the hurricane season, and the year had
rounded before he and D’Orves sailed for the Coromandel, or east
coast of India, to take some French troops to the help of Mysore.
This was probably Suffren’s urging, for D’Orves would hardly have
thought of it for himself. On the way two things happened:
Suffren’s Heros fell in with and took one of the British
fifties, and D’Orves died.

The Bailli de Suffren was now commander of the fleet. His
objective was to land the troops at Mysore, then, if possible, take
Trincomalee, which controlled Ceylon. Trincomalee had an excellent
harbor, though, like all others except those in English hands,
devoid of supplies that would support a fleet. On the morning of
February 17, 1782, French and British sighted each other off
Sadras, the French covering their convoy northeast of the British;
twelve French, nine British battleships, but the latter heavier
ones. The wind was mildly off the land from the French side. Hughes
began to form his line heading eastward downwind, so that when the
usual afternoon sea breeze rose he would be in a good position to
attack from windward, in the best tradition of British sea dogs.
Before he got things completely in order he was startled by a sight
no one had seen for a hundred years, the French coming down like a
herd of charging elephants to attack him.

Suffren himself led the line; he ran along the port side of the
British formation as far as number 4 from the head, Hughes’ own
flagship, Superb, 74, hove back and began to fire at pistol
shot. The three British ships ahead were now downwind and would
have an exceedingly difficult time tacking back to get into action,
which was precisely what Suffren intended. He also intended that
the rear ships of his fleet should run up the leeward side of the
British rear and so double on them; but in the French service, as
in the British, there were Fighting Instructions that prohibited
breaking the line of battle. Most of Suffren’s captains either did
not believe he meant what he said when he gave the doubling order,
or were so bound by custom that they could not bring themselves to
obey. Only one ship really doubled, and she was a fifty, though
toward the end another made it; but even so the British had enough
to do. When the sea breeze did rise after two hours of fighting,
the British had two ships badly damaged.

Suffren saw he could accomplish nothing more that day, landed
his troops, and ran south to cruise off Trincomalee, writing
furious letters to the Ministry of Marine about the conduct of his
captains. "I should have destroyed the English squadron," and, "My
heart is wrung by the most general defection." Hughes had to go to
Madras to refit; there he was joined by two fresh battleships and
sailed for Ceylon, reasonably worried about Trincomalee and anxious
to throw supplies into the place. On April 11, about fifty miles
northeast of the port and off Provedien, the French ships were in
sight again to the windward. In spite of the fact that the two new
ships gave him slightly more than the French strength, Hughes was
not especially anxious to fight a battle; he had another mission.
But the experience of Sadras had taught him that if this fat
Frenchman wanted a fight he was going to have it, and when dawn of
April 12 showed the leading French overtaking his rear ships, he
formed line and waited.

This time Suffren forbore anything fancy; he simply ordered all
ships to form on a line of bearing, which is at an angle to the
line of approach, and bore down for a ship-to-ship attack, with his
one extra, Brilliant, 64, to double on the British rear
ship. But the sailing qualities of the ships were very unequal and
a line of bearing is very hard to maintain. Moreover, as the ships
at the head of the French line came under fire, they luffed up and
replied, and so, ultimately, did those at the tail of the line. Led
by Suffren himself, the French at the center pressed in, and seeing
a gap, so did Brilliant. The consequence was a French line
in a curve, concave toward the British, with ship after ship
crowding toward the center until there were no less than five
French ships engaged in the closest kind of action with three
British, and there ensued one of the bloodiest naval combats in
history, at a range where it was almost impossible to miss.

The British Monmouth, 64, was beaten out of line with a
third of her crew casualties, her mizzen- and mainmasts down;
Hughes’ flagship lost nearly as many, and so did Monarca,
68. Heros was much disabled in rigging, but stayed in tight
action till three-forty in the afternoon, when Hughes wore away out
of the fight and there was too much damage and laxity among
Suffren’s ships for him to follow. Even a direct order by signal
for Artesien to take possession of the completely disabled
Monmouth was not obeyed.

For two days the fleets lay at anchor making repairs, and
temporarily it looked like a draw. But in reality Hughes had been
so hard hit his fleet operations were paralyzed. He had to put into
Trincomalee and stay for six weeks, while Suffren ramped all around
Ceylon, mopping up British convoys of supplies and transports and
seeing his own through. The sultan took the British stronghold of
Cuddalore; there was no fleet to cover it.

VII

This was the news that, reaching Europe late in the
summer—when the British got their hands free enough from
other entanglements to afford an expedition
somewhere—determined that the expedition should be to India,
not America. It was the news that the French had a new kind of sea
captain, one who always attacked, who fought terribly, who beat
British sea dogs at their own game, and who had a high sense of
strategy. They did not know of Suffren’s difficulties with his
captains; or that he was so short of spare spars that he had to
take the masts out of his frigates; or that he was so short of men
he had to embark land artillerists.

They did not know his troubles, but they knew their own. The
fact that there were three more of those desperate combats later,
with the bailiff always victorious in spite of increasing British
reinforcements, has made historians and readers alike regard the
fighting off the Coromandel Coast as a flowing, continuous
campaign—which, indeed, it was. But the continuous campaign
has drawn attention away from the vital factor, which was the time
factor, the date the news reached Europe that the British fleet off
India was faced by an antagonist who thought in terms of destroying
it, and who possessed the will, the skill, and probably the
means.

For on that fleet the British empire in India depended. The
American colonies were about as good as gone, and under the
conditions of the time, they were as much of a liability as an
asset anyway, but the empire of India was the great cash crop of
Britain. It not only furnished the widows and orphans and retired
colonels with their pensions, it provided much of the means by
which the British government itself existed. Let America go, then,
but for heaven’s sake, save India—this was the unspoken
principle, the line on which Whitehall was forced to act. It is not
too much to say that if De Grasse made it possible for the British
to be ejected from the thirteen colonies the Bailiff of Malta,
halfway around the world, was the man who kept them from
recovering.

When word of the peace came, Suffren’s return to France was like
a triumphal progress down an avenue of cheering; even the British
captains came aboard at Table Bay to honor the man who had fought
them so hard. In 1788 a dispute arose between England and France,
and Suffren was appointed to command a great fleet fitting out at
Brest. He died on his way thither and the dispute was settled. One
can only wonder.

14. TRAFALGAR,
AUSTERLITZ, AND THE FALL AND RISE OF EMPIRE

I

It is important to view events in their contemporary
context.

In October 1797, General Bonaparte, officially "captain of
artillery in temporary command of the Army of Italy," signed a
peace with the Austrians and returned to Paris to face an unstable
government of five Directors, who were practically without popular
support and intensely jealous of their all too popular army
commanders. The war on the Continent was over; the only remaining
hostility to the Revolution was the absolutely implacable hatred of
England. General Bonaparte was appointed to command an army for the
invasion of the seagirt isle—with an implied threat that
non-acceptance of the commission would result in his being returned
to his captaincy.

In February 1798 he accordingly inspected the coast of Normandy
and the flotilla of small craft gathered there, and reported in a
sense unfavorable to the enterprise. Of his own capacity and that
of the French soldiers he entertained no doubt; the difficulty was
to bring them into contact with the British. To do that would
require the extremely dangerous enterprise of stealing a crossing
during one of the long winter nights in the face of heavy English
ships that could easily scatter the whole flotilla. He advised,
however, that the preparations be kept up to fix British attention
at the Channel and confirm them in that withdrawal of fleets from
the Mediterranean to which an otherwise profitless French naval
expedition to Ireland in 1796 had so effectively contributed.
Bonaparte himself would be glad to undertake an expedition through
that now friendly Mediterranean against Egypt, a practically
independent suzerainty of Turkey, a storehouse of immense
resources, and the gateway to the East, "where there are a hundred
million men." The East, even more importantly, from where the
English drew those resources which enabled them to dominate the
financial exchanges and markets of Europe.

The English war against the French Revolution was primarily a
war about those markets, though it had been prettied up with a good
many phrases about lawlessness let loose in the world, insatiable
ambition, and the murder of divinely anointed kings. In the address
which was the younger Mr. Pitt’s proclamation of that war, the only
physical act charged against the French government was the opening
of the Scheldt to make Antwerp a port of entry, a place closed to
commerce by treaty ever since the southern Netherlands became
Austrian. The Anglo-French section of the wars of the Revolution
was thus a separate struggle, a continuation under new terms of the
sempiternal English effort to exclude all others from the business
of delivering both home and colonial products to the
Continent—in fine, to establish and maintain a commercial
monopoly, a monopoly of gold. Down to the date when General
Bonaparte was sent to the Channel, this war had followed the normal
course, with English expeditions snapping up colonial possessions,
English money supporting the armies that attacked France on land,
and English bankers profiting hugely on the whole transaction
through an involved structure of international debt.

This was the system that Bonaparte proposed to break in on by
giving France a new colonial area, peculiarly her own. If this new
colonial empire did not emancipate her from the need for overseas
products, it at least would provide a medium of exchange for them
other than the gold that was being indirectly drained out of the
country, even in wartime. Something of the kind was more or less
necessary if France was to make the Revolution permanent. Up to
this time the government had been largely financed by seizures from
the Church and nobility, but the end of that resource was in sight.
As for the strategy of the operation, Bonaparte thought in the
essentially military terms of deception and speed—and
calculated that by the time the British could react they would be
faced with the fait accompli of a French Egypt, with Malta
as a guard post on the line of communications.

The government of the five Directors decided that an expedition
to Egypt would relieve them of the awkward problem of providing for
some thousands of soldiers who had been defending the country for
so long they had become professionalized, and the movement was
approved. But Bonaparte failed—understandably since it had
not been that way before—to calculate on the aggressive
strategy of the new group of British admirals, and his deceptions
deceived too well. The destination of the armament fitting out at
Toulon was put forward as Ireland, and the British believed it. But
instead of falling back from his blockade of Cadiz and the
Gibraltar Straits to cover the Channel approaches, Admiral Lord St.
Vincent of the Gibraltar command jutted forward into the
Mediterranean a squadron of thirteen battleships and a fifty under
orders to find the Toulon fleet, wherever it was, and to destroy
it.

The commander was a little one-armed, one-eyed sailorman named
Sir Horatio Nelson, recently made rear admiral for gallantry in an
action with the Spaniards. The evidence is that the appointment was
due to the personal intervention of dim-witted old George III, who
liked the man without being at all aware that he had some very
unusual qualities indeed. For one, this Nelson was perfectly
prepared to give literal obedience to the order to destroy the
enemy, instead of merely defeating him and confounding his
projects, like all previous naval commanders with the sole
exception of Suffren. He wanted everything; once he wrote, "Now had
we taken ten sail and allowed the eleventh to escape, when it had
been possible to have got at her, I could never have called it well
done." In the second place he called his captains "a band of
brothers," and treated them as such. It is hard to realize today
exactly what that meant in 1798. For over a century every naval
battle in which the British were victors, as they usually were, had
been followed by a court-martial in which the captain who did least
well was condemned and dismissed from the service as a kind of
booby prize. It was part of the tradition, like flogging and the
Fighting Instructions. Nelson laid it down that "No captain can go
far wrong who lays his ship alongside the enemy," and left his band
of brothers to their own devices, apart from the most general
orders.

He concentrated his fleet off Sardinia on June 7 and shortly
afterward learned that the Toulon armament had left port on May 19.
It had certainly not gone through the straits for Ireland or he
would have met it. His instructions mentioned the possibility that
the revolutionary army was sailing for the twin kingdoms of Naples
and Sicily, then under the misrule of a monarch called "Ferdinand
the Burglar," a perfectly fit object of attack to a government that
had proclaimed its intention of abolishing monarchy everywhere. Off
Sicily, Nelson learned that the French had taken Malta and gone
east; he had no orders but those for the destruction of the fleet,
but he followed, and the succeeding weeks were filled with looking
for them at Alexandria (where he arrived too early), Crete, Turkey,
Greece.

On the late afternoon of August 1, Nelson found them at last,
fourteen ships of the line, anchored in Aboukir Bay, heads to the
wind, which was light from the north. Sir Horatio, who had taken
practically no food at all for a week, ordered an ample dinner,
remarking, "Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage
or Westminster Abbey." Without orders beyond the preliminary
general instructions, the British battleships formed and rushed
down on the French line, the four leading British ships doubling
around its head on the inshore side while the others took station
outside. Thus each French ship at the head of their line had two
opponents, usually with one of them in position to rake her
lengthwise along the decks; nor could the French ships at the rear
beat up against the wind to join the battle. As the head of the
line was crushed into striking their colors, the British moved
down. All night the cannon roared across the bay, the French
flagship caught fire and blew up, and in the morning there were
only two of them left to escape.

Sir Horatio had carried out to the letter his orders to destroy
the French fleet (for the two refugees did not last long) and
gained his peerage; the Abbey would come later.

II

The Battle of the Nile, as it came to be called, was decisive in
more than one sense. It said no to Bonaparte’s Eastern dream and
placed him in a dangerous position. The wars for the colonies
during the eighteenth century had been fought out on land; English
sea power gave tremendous advantages in the transmission and
support of expeditions and the English usually won, but French
fleets remained in existence even when beaten, and it was possibly
for them to provide at least intermittent help to the overseas
areas, as it had been given to Montcalm. The night in Aboukir Bay
wiped out the only part of the French navy that mattered in that
area. Not even precacious communication with metropolitan France
was any longer possible. The load of maintaining Egypt had become
one that not even military genius could carry; there were too many
shortages at the colonial end of the severed line of supply.

Bonaparte was perfectly conscious of the fact that this
demonstrated no French overseas dominion could be established in
the face of such naval power except on a self-supporting basis.
When he became First Consul of France, already emperor in all but
name, one of his first projects was to set up such a
dominion—in Louisiana, with San Domingo as a way station. The
project is generally held to have foundered on yellow fever and the
resistance of the San Domingo blacks, but First Consul Bonaparte
was a persistent and intelligent man, and it is not at all
impossible that he would have succeeded in setting up his
system—given time. Probably few wars were ever begun for
reasons having less to do with the realities than the one which
ended the brief Anglo-French peace in 1803. On the British side the
pretext was Bonaparte’s interference in neutral Switzerland and
Holland; while the French claimed that Britain had not evacuated
Malta and Cape Town, according to treaty. Actually, both sides were
fully aware that the real issue was the French laws excluding
British ships and products from ports under Bonaparte’s control and
the British failure to get a commercial treaty that brought this
state of affairs to an end.

Bonaparte was rebuilding the French navy, but it was still well
short of the almost parity point he needed. A war with England on
the basis of overseas possessions maintained by occasional
expeditions that evaded British fleets was the classical formula.
The new strategy, the new tactics of the Nile demonstrated that his
means were inadequate for such a project. He knew that only a
radical solution would do, and the only radical solution that would
be permanent was to strike England down on the home grounds; that
is, get an army into the island and smash up those dockyards that
were the nexus of her fleet and overseas trade.

Bonaparte estimated that 100,000 men and six hours’ undisputed
possession of the Channel would be about right. The army, called
"of the Coasts of the Ocean," assembled from the Texel to Brest,
was one of the finest ever brought together anywhere, far more
effective than that army he had refused to lead in 1797. For the
crossing there were to be provided 2,000 vessels of the type called
praams, designed by the distinguished naval architect Pierre
Alexandre Forfait, tubs just barely able to sail, but with oar
power in addition, and armed with guns heavy enough to keep light
British craft, such as frigates and sloops, at a distance. They
were built at every place where ships could be built from the Dutch
harbors down to the upper waters of the Loire.

It is hard to tell precisely what the master plan for their
employment was because of Bonaparte’s habitual policy of
concealment and still more habitual method of leaving himself
alternatives, but in the beginning it seems to have been for the
invasion fleet to concentrate at Boulogne and make a crossing under
night, storm, or fog. This was dropped out early in the game. Tests
showed that Forfait’s design was imperfect. The praams could not
work along the coast to concentrate in the face of opposition. It
would take a full forty-eight hours to get them loaded and across
the bar at Boulogne, and when the wind blew strongly enough to move
the clumsy vessels, they could not work their guns.

Bonaparte was thus driven to revise his plan in the direction of
obtaining genuine naval command of the Channel for the necessary
crossing period and using big ships. He counted on deception again,
as when he went to Egypt. A new fleet had been built up at Toulon
under Admiral Louis-Rene de Latouche-Treville, eleven battleships
strong. It was being watched by Sir Horatio, now Lord Nelson, who
had twelve of the line, but the shape of the coast was such that no
intimate blockade could be maintained. Bonaparte, always so
prescient in following the mental qualities of his opponents,
believed that Nelson had a fixation toward Egypt. If
Latouche-Treville were sighted steering south out of Toulon,
Nelson’s scouts would inform him, and he would almost inevitably be
off to Alexandria. But Latouche-Treville would go in the opposite
direction, out into the Atlantic, making for Rochefort, where five
French ships were blockaded by an equal number of British. These he
would release, and having picked up one ship from Cadiz in friendly
Spain, he would have seventeen, a force superior to the fifteen
British ships under Admiral Cornwallis who were blockading the
other major French fleet of fourteen in Brest. If Cornwallis stayed
close to Brest, Latouche-Treville would hurry to the Channel and
cover the invasion; if Cornwallis instead chose to fight, it did
not matter whether Latouche-Treville won or lost, the British would
be in no shape to prevent the Brest fleet convoying the army
across.

This was quite a good plan, which encountered only one obstacle:
before it could be executed, while Latouche-Treville was still
training his crews to an efficiency such as no French fleet had
possessed since the Revolution, the admiral died.

And he was the last of the admirals. All the others senior
enough to command a fleet bore what Bonaparte himself called "the
souvenir of the Nile." They had been in that horrible disaster, and
it had been borne in on them in a way hardly to be expressed in
words that no French officer could conquer the English at sea. The
First Consul, always peculiarly sensitive to matters of morale, was
fully conscious of this. When he appointed Pierre Charles Jean
Sylvestre Villeneuve to replace Latouche-Treville at Toulon, he
altered the plan to one which involved no fighting except in
possession of enormously superior numbers.

Villeneuve was to dismiss Nelson as before, but instead of
making for Rochefort and the Channel, would run for the sugar
islands of the West Indies. News of this would reach London, and as
the sugar islands were almost as important to England as India, it
would cause a squadron to be sent there. Villeneuve was to stay
among the islands only long enough to pick up six battleships that
would escape from Rochefort to meet him there, then return to
Europe, wipe out the five British blockaders who were holding a
French group of equal strength at Ferrol in northwest Spain; then,
avoiding Cornwallis off Brest (if he had not already been sent to
the West Indies), make for the Channel and the invasion. He was not
to fight except with the blockaders of Ferro, twenty-three ships
against five.

In execution of this plan Villenueve duly put out of Toulon.
Nelson was deceived according to prescription and went off to
Egypt. But the French fleet met a storm and had to put back, and
Nelson closed in again. A new factor was introduced when friendly
Spain decided that going to war with England would be cheaper than
paying the treaty subsidies that enabled France to continue her war
"for the mutual benefit." Everybody told Bonaparte that the Spanish
navy was not in good shape, but his motto was always, "There are no
bad regiments, only bad colonels," and the attraction of a number
of Spanish battleships that would give him a clear superiority on
the water was irresistible. He again altered the plan to include
Spanish squadrons.

It now became an enormously complicated device for moving
British fleets around as though they were under Bonaparte’s orders.
Villeneuve was to escape from Toulon again, sending Nelson to
Egypt, pick up Spanish ships at Cartagena and Cadiz, and sail for
the West Indies. There he would meet the Rochefort squadron, whose
blockaders would of course imagine that it was making for Ireland
and go there. The big Brest fleet would escape blockade and meet
him there. Admiral Cornwallis, with the Western Squadron (as it was
called) would obviously pursue the French to the West Indies, in
accordance with the principle of making the main enemy force the
objective. The Brest fleet would elude him, join Villeneuve, return
to Ferrol and, on releasing the squadron there, attain the Channel
for the vital six hours. This was the plan actually put into
operation, and it all depended upon the idea that the British must
concentrate to follow any French fleet that put to sea.

The working out was not as complex as the plan itself, and it
had features that Bonaparte had failed to count on. One was that
Nelson could not be hoodwinked a second time; instead of going to
Egypt he followed Villeneuve to the West Indies, and news that he
was among the islands brought the French admiral back to Europe
prematurely, in order to avoid fighting the battle he had been
forbidden to fight. The Cadiz and Rochefort Franco-Spanish
squadrons got out, but instead of following them their blockaders
simply joined with the Western Squadron at the gates of the
Channel. As soon as a French fleet reappeared anywhere, one
adequate to deal with it was detached from the Western Squadron.
That is, the British did not concentrate against the moving French
fleets, but at the point where these fleets must take decisive
action. Even Nelson joined this concentration when he returned from
the Indies. Villenueve simply dared not try to run around this
concentration. He made for Ferrol instead and, after an indecisive
action with the British blockaders there, pushed in.

There were twelve Franco-Spanish ships inside, which brought
Villenueve’s strength to the paper-potent figure of twenty-eight.
Bonaparte expected him to come to the Channel at once, and even
addressed a letter to him at Brest; but as the head of the French
state failed to grasp the basic British strategic plan of
reinforcing the Western Squadron every time a French fleet
disappeared, so also he failed to understand that there was no
fundamental identity between a military base and a secure harbor.
At the former all things needed by an army are almost automatically
provided by the surrounding country; but a fleet requires such
specialized items as masts, tar, timber, and cordage. There were
none of these in Ferrol, and Villeneuve’s ships had returned from
their double transit of the Atlantic so worn down in precisely
these items that most of them would need refit before attempting
battle or even another cruise. Ferrol was for the time being not
under blockade; Villeneuve accordingly sailed for Cadiz, where he
could get his supplies.

This was the decisive event; all the rest was appendant.

III

It was evident to the man who had now become the Emperor
Napoleon I that this ended any chance of his gaining control of the
English Cannel for the necessary time. Villeneuve had succeeded in
effecting a concentration of thirty-three battleships at Cadiz, but
this was a long way from the western approaches, where there was
already a far greater British concentration. The admiral was
accordingly ordered to get out of Cadiz and report to Toulon for a
different campaign, whose precise nature has never been determined,
but which would be a part of the new policy Napoleon instantly
adopted on the arrival of the news from Cadiz. "You have much to do
to regain His Majesty’s confidence," read part of the order;
Villeneuve decided that the only way to that accomplishment was to
accept battle and win when he put out of Cadiz.

And he would have to accept battle. British cruisers had of
course spotted the retreat from Ferrol to Cadiz, and Lord Nelson
was at once ordered to the latter point. He had thirty-three ships
of the line, the same number available to the allies, but six of
them had gone to Gibraltar for food and water, so there were only
twenty-seven when on October 21, 1805, the Franco-Spanish fleet was
sighted off Cape Trafalgar, running down for the straits under
light airs from north and northwest.

Nelson had already formed a battle plan—an outgrowth of
the one at the Nile—to advance against the allied line in two
columns, break through it in both places, and double against their
center and rear while their van would have to work back against the
wind to help, and could hardly arrive until the other ships had
been crushed. (Sailing battleships maneuvered very slowly against
the wind.) This would apparently involve each British ship
being subjected to end-on raking fire as she approached the allied
line, but the danger was less than it looked, because once the
first ships had broken through and counterraked the allies at the
point of penetration the latter would no longer be able to fire
effectively, and as successive British doubled down the allied line
and gaps would grow. Nelson led one column of twelve ships in the
three-decker Victory, 100; Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood
headed the other in Royal Sovereign, 100.

A rather odd and unnoticed thing about the plan was that it was
exactly what Villeneuve anticipated, though he had not foreseen the
detail of Nelson’s two-column arrangement. In the earlier action
off Ferrol the British had tried something like it; a fog which
partially concealed movements and a quick-witted turn by the
Spanish Admiral Gravina foiled them. This time Villeneuve placed
the same Gravina in charge of a while division of ships at the head
of the line, with instructions to operate independently, at his own
discretion, to prevent any British line-breaking, doubling attack.
But just as Nelson’s two columns began their slow-motion rush
across the gently heaving sea, Villeneuve was visited with an
inspiration. He turned his fleet simultaneously till it pointed
nearly northwest, close-hauled, almost head to wind; and this had
the effect that instead of being at the head of the line Gravina
was very near the tail of it, in no position to make a
counterattack or signal anyone else to do so.

In the British fleet Nelson hung out his famous signal, "England
expects that every man will do his duty," and there was a burst of
cheering from the line of battleships, as Victory headed for
the huge four-decker Santissima Trinidad, 130, largest
warship in the world, Nelson being certain that the French flagship
would not be far from her. It was just falling on noon when the
allies opened fire against Collingwood’s column, slightly in
advance of Nelson’s. Royal Sovereign’s sails were rags and
she had a good many dead before she reached contact point, but when
she did, her first tremendous raking broadside brought down 400 men
aboard a Spanish three-decker. Now as ship after ship piled through
the gap Collingwood opened and the allied vessels on their line of
sailing began to bunch toward the area, the battle at the rear of
the line turned into a disorderly, smoke-shrouded tangle; but it is
to be noted that there were always two or three British ships to
one of the allies, usually in raking position.

The cloud of smoke and thunder had been collecting over this
area for quite half an hour when Victory plunged through the
line, just where Nelson wanted to be, under the stern of the French
flagship, Bucentaure, 80. Victory had lost a tenth of
her people during the advance; now she repaid it all in one
terrible broadside that dismounted twenty of Bucentaure’s
guns and wrecked the ship, then locked side to side with
Redoubtable, 74. The French ship should have been, and was
in fact, no match for the three-decker, but her Captain Lucas had
trained his men carefully with small arms, and from her tops there
poured down a devastating fire of musketry onto Victory’s
upper deck. Captain Hardy saw the admiral beside him spin around
and sink to his knees, saying slowly, "They have done for me at
last."

"I hope not, sir."

"Yes, my backbone is shot through."

It was true. All afternoon, as the admiral of England lay dying,
the whole ocean area around Trafalgar was covered with rocking,
blazing warships, broken masts, and accumulating debris. At
four-thirty Captain Hardy went to the cockpit to report a victory
and Nelson closed his eyes for the last time. He had taken eighteen
of the allied ships, another went to wreck that night, and four
more were captured as they tried to escape, while nearly all the
rest were so damaged as to be useless.

Except for the always immobilized Brest squadron, Napoleon now
had no navy. There would be none of the "ships, colonies, commerce"
that he regarded as the foundation of a sound polity; no
emancipation from the commercial toils; and Britain was free to
deliver her goods, her resources, her troops to any point touched
by salt water.

IV

The night he received word that Villeneuve had gone to Cadiz was
spent by Napoleon in dictating orders which flung the Army of the
Coasts of the Ocean, now become Grande Armee, halfway across
Europe to the banks of the Danube. For if he could not "end all
coalitions at London," as he had hoped, he must at least deal with
the land arm of the one confronting him, the most dangerous of all
the coalitions faced by France in the post-Revolutionary periods.
In inception it owed a good deal to that morose, flighty,
ambitious, and personally charming character, Alexander I of
Russia, who took his own name seriously and wanted to be great. In
form this coalition was a general European congress of peace and
mediation, whose basic purpose was to put an end to the quarrel
between England and France, a kind of precursor to the United
Nations. In fact, it was a general alliance against France and the
Revolution, for although Alexander referred to himself as a
liberal, his liberalism did not extend to people who decapitated
hereditary kings.

Of course, the thing was not altogether that simple. The trigger
event in determining Alexander to launch the war of the Third
Coalition, and Austria somewhat hesitantly to join, was Napoleon’s
assumption of the crown of (north) Italy. In the eyes of diplomats
with memories this made the new France into an expanding state of
the Louis XIV type. But the basic Continental idea was that
espoused with considerable skill and passion by Friedrich Gentz,
the publicist—the idea of eliminating from the world a system
utterly subversive of all society and good order. The fact that its
head now called himself an emperor did not conceal from either
Gentz or Alexander that this "empire" rested on usurpation, the
confiscation of Church and landed properties, and the execution of
those who had held them by "the canaille."

Austria and Russia agreed to go to war against this system even
though they could not persuade the Prussians to join their
pan-European peace union at once. A plan of campaign was drawn up
by General Karl Mack of the Austrian service. Along the frontier in
Italy he established a "cordon sanitaire" of troops, technically to
prevent the spread of a yellow fever epidemic from Tuscany,
actually to hide Austrian mobilization and strength. The main
theater of war would be there, in Italy, where Austria could hope
the greatest gain, and it was assigned to the ablest of the
Hapsburg princely soldiers, Archduke Karl, with 94,000 men. North
of the Alps, the Austrian army of 84,000, under Mack’s personal
command, would first coerce Bavaria into joining the alliance, then
push forward to Ulm, where the Iller falls into the Danube, ready
to strike at the heads of any French columns coming through the
Black Forest. The first Russian army of 40,000, under General
Kutuzov, would arrive in Mack’s rear on October 16, 1805, closely
followed by 30,000 more under General Bennigsen; they would operate
north of the Danube, sustaining Mack as he pushed forward from the
Iller. Fifty thousand more Russians under General Buxhowden would
follow through Silesia and Bohemia, operating down the Frankfurt
gap against the middle Rhine. Mack was pretty well informed about
the force of the French army. It would have to leave troops at the
Channel to provide against English invasion, and on the basis of
this and logistic problems, Napoleon could hardly reach the upper
waters of the Danube through the Black Forest before November 10,
and then with not over 70,000 men.

Ample allowance was thus made for accident and error, but there
were two errors Mack failed to take into consideration. One was
introduced by his personal intelligence officer, the man who
collected the information about the French army, theoretically a
young Hungarian nobleman named Schulmeister, who had been in France
for some time; actually a French spy, who was feeding the Austrians
whatever information Napoleon thought they ought to have and
sending to Paris everything he could find out. The second error was
that in the staff conversations with the Russians nobody but
Schulmeister had noticed that they were talking according to the
Orthodox calendar, while the Austrians were referring to the
Gregorian, which had a twelve-day difference. Schulmeister sent
this information to Paris instead of referring it to Vienna.

The Russians would thus be nearly two weeks late, and the French
would arrive many weeks too soon, not with the 70,000 Mack had been
led to expect, but with nearly 177,000, propelled from the Channel
at Napoleonic marching speed. Moreover, this was a new kind of
army. The normal arrangement attached a force of cavalry to each
division, and artillery to each infantry battalion. In the
Grande Armee the guns were taken away from battalion to be
concentrated in divisional parks, and the cavalry assembled in one
huge corps, 22,000 strong, with its own artillery. Its mission was
to screen the movement, which flowed in parallel rivers of steel,
not through the Black Forest, as expected, but across the whole
northwest of Germany to a series of points on the Danube between
Mack’s position and Vienna.

In the later days of September, Mack’s outposts at the debouches
of the Black Forest began to encounter French horsemen; from the
fact that they had guns with them he deduced that infantry could
not be far behind, and ordered a concentration in the Ulm area. The
first solid news came on October 7, and it was appalling: the
French were already south of the Danube, across his line of
communications, in great force.

The Austrian general did his best to cut his way out, first
along one bank of the river, then the other, but he was outnumbered
at every point of contact, bewildered, surrounded. A week later he
was bursting into tears as he delivered his sword to Napoleon,
with, "Behold the unfortunate Mack!"

V

Nearly 70,000 of Mack’s men were dead or prisoners, but
Napoleon’s problems were only beginning. His line of communications
stretched back a hundred miles to the Rhine, and many troops were
required to maintain it; considerable forces had to be detached to
cover the south flank against Austrians in the Tyrol and Italy; and
in late October, before the advance down the Danube could begin,
Kutuzov reached Vienna with the first Russian contingent. The next
six weeks were occupied by a campaign of maneuver down the funnel
of the Danube valley toward where Vienna stands at the eastern gate
of Europe. After the disaster at Ulm and the arrival of the
Buxhowden contingent with their emperor, the Russians had much the
larger proportion of the allied forces and were able to call the
strategic tune. They greatly shocked the Austrians by their
doctrine of giving up space and even Vienna city for time, but it
was done, and in a fighting retreat the French were drawn through
the mountains into Bohemia just east of Brunn at the end of
November.

A not unimportant element in the situation was stiff
Austro-Russian diplomatic pressure on Prussia to join the league of
mediation with her 180,000 soldiers, drilled in the manner of
Frederick the Great. This pressure had reached its peak; as French
and allied patrols bickered along the road between Brunn and
Olmutz, the Prussian foreign minister was at Napoleon’s
headquarters to deliver an ultimatum and the allies knew it. They
were also fully conscious that successive retirements toward
reserves had given them a field numerical superiority (the cold
figures were 85,000 to 70,000), that the French cavalry had for
several days been showing a want of enterprise, the French infantry
advances had been stopped. Napoleon seemed to regret having been
pulled so far from his base and to be preparing for a withdrawal.
To strike him at such a moment of doubt would not only take
advantage of the moral and numerical factors, but would undoubtedly
draw Prussia in. Colonel Weyrother, the Austrian Kaiser’s chief of
staff, was appointed to draw a battle plan.

Patrols had located the French in a roughly northeast-southwest
line across the Brunn-Olmutz highway, on some hills with steep
slopes but flat tops, just behind a brook called the Goldbach,
which flows south into some pools, now frozen. East of this brook
is a high hill, the Pratzen, just in front of the village of
Austerlitz, which the French had held but abandoned, one of the
reasons for thinking they meant retreat. At the village of
Sokolnitz, on the French side of the Goldbach, the hills occupied
by them break away sharply southwestward toward the road running
south to Vienna. This road was Napoleon’s line of communications,
and Weyrother, who was a great student of Frederick the Great,
perceived that the position offered an admirable opportunity for an
oblique attack in Frederick’s own manner, the weight to be directed
against the French right wing, their sensitive flank.

The detail of the plan was that Austrian General Kienmayer, with
the Austrian cavalry and some light infantry, would work close
along the ponds around the French right toward Raigern Abbey, on
the Brunn-Vienna road. Russian General Dokhtorov, 8,500 men, would
strike the extreme French right; General Langeron, a French emigre
in the Russian service, with 12,000 men was to attack Sokolnitz,
next in line; General Przebyschevski, 14,000 strong, to assault
Sokolnitz Castle, just upstream from the village. While this triple
attack was breaking the French right, their left center would be
contained by General Bagration, striking along the Brunn-Olmutz
highway toward a little round hill called the Santon, supported by
6,000 Austrian cavalry and the Russian imperial cavalry guard under
Grand Duke Constantine, 8,500 men. Concealed behind the Pratzen
were 25,000 more men, a heavy column under Russian Miloradovitch
and Austrian Kollowrath; they would follow the
Dokhtorov-Przebyschevki-Langeron columns, rolling up the French
line after their right was broken.

The plan was explained at a council of war on the night of
December 2, 1805, and the attack was set for dawn. It was indeed
the sort of battle plan the great Frederick might have conceived,
and there was only one thing wrong with it—that it was
exactly what Napoleon was inviting the allies to do. In view of the
menace of Prussia it was even more necessary for him to win a
battle than for them, and he had planned not merely to win, but to
destroy. His left did not extend beyond the Santon hill; but there
he placed Marshal Lannes with three heavy and very good divisions,
ordered to hold hard. On his right, along the hills from Sokolnitz
to Raigern Abbey, he stationed his very best fighting commander,
Marshal Davout, with orders to hold like hell; all the rest of the
army, over 40,000 men, were arranged in depth between the Santon
and Sokolnitz, a coiled spring under heavy pressure waiting to be
released, a torpedo waiting to be launched. That evening the
Emperor of the French rode along the lines, and as the soldiers
made torches of straw and shouted at him, said, "Before tomorrow
night I’ll have that army," gesturing toward where the allies had
taken up position precisely as he had hoped they would.

The morning broke thick, with a growl of cannon out to the
allied left, the French right. Kienmayer found he did not have room
to work up his horse for a swing on the extreme flank, and as
Dokhtorov’s column crossed the Goldbach, it met sharpshooters on
vineyard-covered slopes, slowed up and pinched in by the fact that
the neighboring columns occupied so much room that nobody could
deploy properly. The Russians came on with their usual Slavic
resolution, and Langeron even took Sokolnitz village in fighting so
fierce that both sides were shooting across parapets of corpses;
but the assaulters could not make their numbers count, and at the
very moment when they began to close on Sokolnitz Castle, Davout
violently counterattacked them with a storm of heavy cavalry. The
advance against the French right was halted dead by eight in the
morning.

At the same hour the sun—the sun of Austerlitz, as it came
to be called—burst through the clouds and Napoleon, looking
across the clear valley at the Pratzen, said to his Marshal Soult,
"How long do you require to reach those heights?"

"Less than twenty minutes."

"In that case, let us wait a quarter of an hour more."

He waited, while smoke and thunder erupted from the valley where
Davout was struggling against the three allied columns, and then
launched his torpedo just as Miloradovitch began to slant across
the eastern edge of the Pratzen to the support of the allied left.
His men were in column, totally undeployed, and their guns were in
limber at the tail of the mass. The hasty line they tried to form
as thousands of French came across the Pratzen was swept right
away; the men of the column surrendered by hundreds and thousands
and the whole high plateau was French by ten o’clock in the
morning. The allied center had disappeared; its right and left were
now separate forces.

On the allied right, the French left, Bagration hit hard at the
French infantry, but Lannes’ men formed square, and Bagration was
himself struck in the flank by cuirassiers dispatched from the
Pratzen by Napoleon. By eleven the allied right was broken;
Napoleon turned his attention to their left, where the columns of
attack had come to a stand, laced them with artillery and musketry
fire, and ordered the guns to break the ice on the frozen pools
across which some were attempting to escape. When the shouting
twilight closed in, Austrians and Russians had lost 30,000 men, all
their baggage, guns, food, ammunition, and transport, and this
particular war was over.

VI

Austerlitz was decisive in two dimensions, one military and one
political. It changed the whole art of war, the method of obtaining
decisions in battle, by introducing grand tactics. In the system of
Gustavus, in that of Frederick the Great, and even in the earlier
Napoleonic battles, it was possible for a commander to change his
mind while the fighting was going on, to reinforce one wing from
another or alter the direction of an attack. Not so at Austerlitz;
the major units were irrevocably committed to a course of action
the moment the fighting began.

Napoleon was the first to perceive that the masses had grown too
large for anything else; that with 70,000 men on a front seven
miles long, no one eye or brain could exercise continuing control.
Oriental armies had often been larger than those that fought at
Austerlitz, but in them there was no effort at any coordinated
tactical plan; it was simply a case of achieving contact and
awaiting the result of a melee. That is, Austerlitz introduced the
system that made it possible to handle in the field and with
precision the new large national armies that were the product of
the universal conscription introduced by the French Revolution.

But this was attained at a price. The Napoleonic grand tactics
involved committing a unit up to a 15,000-man corps to an assigned
course of action and being unable to change its operations
thereafter until it had accomplished its mission. (The columns of
attack on the Pratzen did swing in other directions, but not until
they had demolished Miloradovitch.) This involved not only
pre-planning the battle; it also required that subordinate
commanders should be deprived of all but local initiative. At least
it did in Napoleon’s day, before anyone but himself understood what
the new tactics meant.

In the failure to give initiative to subordinates, in the
failure to develop juniors who seized it for themselves, may be
found one of the causes for the ultimate military downfall of the
Napoleonic empire. The general criticism of Napoleon’s marshals is
that they could lead but not direct. Davout and Massena were
exceptions, to be sure; but in Napoleon’s effort to extend grand
tactics into strategy and personally to control armies operating
across the whole face of Europe, even these two never got an
opportunity to make the most of what they had. The French Empire
may be said to have perished because it had only one man who could
command an army of over 50,000, and his method of grand tactics did
not allow him to bring up successors. When the allies overwhelmed
Napoleon, they did it by beating all the armies but the one he
personally commanded. They had no generals of his ability, but they
had many equal to his subordinates.

Yet the defect in the Napoleonic method was not in the method
itself, but in the physical techniques that supported it;
specifically, those of communication. During the campaigns in Spain
officers accustomed to receiving very precise orders that launched
them in a certain course kept getting directives that no longer
related to the changed conditions. Napoleon had invented something
he lacked the tools to apply to any larger field than Austerlitz,
yet tried to apply everywhere. The French Empire perished through
this fault; but it was the French Empire, not the French Revolution
and the changes it stood for.

If the idea of the universal state died at Lutzen and that of
the Empire of all Germany at Torgau, at Austerlitz there fell the
final claim to imperial dominion over those lands that had once
been Charlemagne’s. Before the campaign of 1805 there remained such
a claim, however shadowy; George II of England was still
Elector of Hannover, Maximilian Joseph was still
Elector of Bavaria, each with at least a theoretical share
in the government of the empire. After that campaign the Holy Roman
Empire became one frankly of the Austrian crown lands alone, a kind
of zombie which would stagger around for another 113 years before
falling down, but whose fate was really decided on that one
field.

There had ceased to exist any real point of focus for the forces
represented by Friedrich Gentz, or any power that stood a chance of
successfully challenging the ideas and policies of the Revolution
as consolidated by Napoleon. The war would last as long as he
lasted, but beneath it the work of consolidation went on, and after
the allies got rid of the man they called "the Monster," they found
they could not do more than throw a veneer over the solid work that
remained. The new society was established; the most the rest of
Europe could do was to get rid of the man who had given it
permanence.

15. THE THINGS DECIDED
AT VICKSBURG

I

In the beginning no one realized how important Vicksburg was. It
was not even a major item in the system of fortifications by which
the Confederacy hoped to secure its natural frontiers in the
West and to exert pressure on the northern states of the
Mississippi valley by blockading the outlets for their products.
That was the original concept; a land blockade of water traffic. In
the terms of 1861 thinking this was a logical project. Ever since
the Old Northwest began to fill up after the Revolution, the
natural outlet for its wheat, beef, pork, lumber, and even the
manufactured products of Pittsburgh had been by way of the
Mississippi. The lakes carried some items to Buffalo for
transshipment down the Erie Canal and the railroads were beginning
to extend steel fingers to the plains, but the great river remained
the main artery.

To dominate the upper river General Leonidas Polk of Confederate
Department 2 lunged forward into "neutral" Kentucky and built a
great fortress on high bluffs at Columbus, armed mainly with the
guns taken in the huge windfall at Norfolk Navy Yard. Forts Henry
and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland covered his rear
areas, and it is interesting to note that they should be regarded
as adequate for that cover; the movement of the armies, like that
of commercial traffic, was regarded as ultimately dependent on
water transport because of the supply problem. No one believed that
any serious military advance could be made through the tangled
western Kentucky country between Columbus and Fort Henry without
exposing its flanks and rear. Below Columbus, at the
Tennessee-Kentucky line, low-lying Island No. 10 was heavily
fortified, and the high ground on the Tennessee side opposite. At
spaced stages between the island and Memphis, wherever geography
offered a field of fire that would make downcoming ships slow up
and take difficult turns, there were other forts—Pillow,
Randolph, Harris. Even Pillow received forty guns; Vicksburg, so
far downstream that its function was considered that of a guard
post, got only a few.

The Confederate strategic concept of 1861 was thus that
commercial necessity would force the Union to make a campaign down
the Mississippi; and that this campaign could be slowed up, brought
to futility against a chain of fortresses, like those that held the
Belgian frontier against France in the old wars. The plan had this
advantage: that, while in the flat plains of Europe any one of
several lines of operation was available to an invading army, the
Union forces were practically compelled to work down the
Mississippi, supporting their drive on river traffic.

That was how it looked to Richmond, specifically to Jefferson
Davis, graduate of West Point and book-learned soldier. The
strategic concept seemed to be confirmed in November 1861, when a
Union force dropped downstream with a couple of gunboats and
temporarily occupied Belmont, opposite Columbus, but was easily
driven off. Not until word came through that the Yankees were
building warships at Cairo and St. Louis was any thought given to
defending the river on the river itself; then there were laid down
at Memphis two powerful ironclad rams of the general type of
Virginia (ex-Merrimack). Down at New Orleans there
was a naval command, but it was solely concerned with the area
between that city and the sea. When General Mansfield Lowell
arrived to take military command of the New Orleans district late
in 1861, he became so exercised over naval defense on the stream
that he seized twelve river ships and converted them to rams,
bulwarked with timber and pressed cotton bales. Most of them were
sent to Memphis as the "River Defense Fleet" under army
command.

The reason for this was that by the time they were ready Union
strategy in the Mississippi valley had unfolded along lines utterly
different from the original Confederate conception. The major
method of operation was less thought out than felt out, but began
to develop fairly early in the fall of 1861, when Brigadier General
U. S. Grant, in military command of an area of vague definition out
of Cairo, Illinois, made contact with Commodore A. H. Foote, who
had been sent west to lead the Mississippi naval squadron.

This squadron had been in process since sumer, and its principal
units were the product of the mind and drive of James B. Eads, a
remarkable man who started as an apple boy, taught himself diving
and engineering, and became a millionaire. The ships were nine
gunboats, intended specifically to deal with fortifications ashore.
They were aptly likened to turtles, with iron plating around their
prows, carrying three heavy guns ahead and four 32-pounders on each
beam. Foote hit it off at once with Grant, and loaned him two
earlier-built wooden gunboats for that operation to Belmont. It was
really a raid, intended to attract attention from operations
elsewhere, and when the Confederates who crossed to the Missouri
shore tried to mop up the little force Grant had brought, they were
stopped cold by the heavy guns of the ships.

The difference in conception as to what had happened at Belmont
had important effects. It confirmed Confederate strategists in
their view that the river could be closed by forts, and it
convinced Grant that guns carried by ships could be moved so fast
and in such numbers that it would be almost impossible for field
troops to stand up against them when also assailed by infantry. In
other words, he had this early attained at least a rudimentary
concept of combined operations, and it was to this type that he
addressed himself as soon as ice-free rivers permitted, at the
beginning of February 1862.

But he did not project this operation down the Mississippi, as
the Confederates expected. A reconnaissance up the Tennessee in
January convinced him that Fort Henry was weakly held. With some
difficulty, he persuaded his departmental commander, General H. W.
Halleck, to let him attack the place, and moved upstream against
it, with seven of Foote’s gunboats leading. On February 6, while
the troops were struggling through drowned land and forest toward
the rear of the fortress, the ships shot it all to pieces, and
Grant arrived only in time to find that it had surrendered to the
navy.

It was characteristic of Grant that instead of asking Halleck
for any more permissions, he should telegraph that he was going to
take Donelson, too, and start marching his men for the place while
the gunboats went around by the rivers. Donelson was a far
different proposition than Henry; instead of being almost water
level, it was mounted up the sides of a steep bluff, its cannon
commanding a bend. The consequence was that when the gunboats moved
in on February 14 they took a plunging fire into their upper decks,
where there was no armor, and were driven off, with several of them
disabled and no particular damage to the fort.

But while this was going on Grant closed on the fort from the
rear. An attempt at a sortie failed, Grant counterattacked and took
enough of the works to make the position untenable. On February 16,
Donelson surrendered with 15,000 men.

It was a turning point in the Civil War in the West. The
Confederacy was all along to suffer from manpower shortages, and
the loss of the Donelson garrison was a serious blow. Still more
serious was the fact that the Confederate defense system was
invalidated, and most of the essentials of war along the western
rivers worked out. The gunboats cruised up the Tennessee clear into
Alabama, and on the Cumberland took Nashville without help from the
land forces. It was also demonstrated that they would have a
decidedly rough time against artillery mounted high for plunging
fire, but could cover and support the operations of troops to take
that artillery from behind.

II

The Henry-Donelson debacle made nonsense of the great fortress
at Columbus, which could be outflanked and cut off along fairly
good lines of communication from Grant’s position on the Tennessee.
It was abandoned, the guns being moved to places farther
downstream, while the troops were called in to Corinth,
Mississippi, by General Albert Sidney Johnston, overall Confederate
commander in the West. He also summoned troops from every other
area under his authority for a great smash to demolish Grant, who
had moved up the Tennessee to Pittsburgh Landing, a position very
dangerous to the Confederacy. It was the normal transshipment point
where goods left the rivers to reach at Corinth both the rail line
running deep into Mississippi and the long lateral road
Memphis-Corinth-Chattanooga, one of the only two such lines
crossing the Confederacy. Halleck ordered General Buell with the
Army of the Ohio to join Grant; he was going to undertake a
campaign against Corinth.

On the morning of Sunday, April 6, 1862, Johnson delivered his
attack, achieve surprise, and almost did demolish Grant’s army.
Thousands of them fled to the cover of the bluffs along the river;
but the rest, sustained mainly by Grant’s personal leadership and
the hard fighting around Shiloh church by a hard-faced, red-bearded
brigadier named William T. Sherman, made it into the most savage
battle yet fought on the American continent. The Union right was
driven far back. But early in the afternoon Albert Sidney Johnston
was killed and there was some confusion in the Confederate command.
The decisive attack on the other wing, intended to pry Grant away
from his river landing and communications, did not come till very
late. By this time the Union line had impacted around the landing
with its artillery in position. The Union gunboats in the river
shelled the rebel lines all night, while Buell’s steady battalions
crossed and filed into line. In the morning the Union forces
counterattacked, drove the Confederates from the field, and it was
Grant’s victory.

It is natural that the early battles in any war should lead to a
good deal of deducing, as it becomes evident that the current
conflict contains elements that have not been present in any other.
Shiloh told both sides that the apparent ease with which the South
had won at Bull Run and the North at Fort Donelson was illusory;
that a hard and probably long struggle was in prospect—and
this was true. It also founded in the North the reputation of Grant
as a smash ’em, hard-bitten fighter who did not do much thinking,
and though this was not true at all, it clung to him to the end,
and was reinforced by his taciturnity, his immobile countenance,
and a certain deliberation of physical movement.

Probably more important to the progress of the war were the
deductions drawn by the commanders. One of the reasons Grant got
himself surprised was that he failed to entrench. Halleck, who now
assumed command of the combined armies of Grant and Buell for the
drive on Corinth, did not intend to let that happen again, and
conducted his drive by digging, which achieved the lightning speed
of a mile a day. He got Corinth, all right, but not until May 30,
1862, and then found he did not know what to do with it. His army
numbered above 100,000 men; the Confederates had torn up the
north-south railroad down from Columbus so that all supplies had to
come by the Tennessee, but that river was now so low it would
hardly any longer carry the necessities for so many troops.
Moreover, the Confederates, relieved of immediate pressure, had set
up an area of operations around Chattanooga, and it was important
to prevent the army there from jabbing northward. Just before he
was called East to take general direction of the armies of the
republic, Halleck accordingly divided, sending Buell to counter the
force around Chattanooga and leaving Grant to conduct operations
from Corinth.

But the most significant of the lessons from Shiloh was in the
work of the river navy, which supported the army at the end of a
long line of secure communications and furnished that invaluable
artillery cover for the endangered Union left wing. The point was
underscored by an event that took place farther west at almost the
same time. This was the fall of the great Confederate river barrier
at Island No. 10. General John Pope approached the place along the
Missouri shore with an army of some 20,000, but was prohibited from
crossing to pinch it out from the Tennessee side by field guns
along the narrow strip of dry ground there. But on the night of
April 4, Commander Henry Walke of the ironclad Carondelet
ran his ship downstream right through the batteries in a storm of
thunder and lightning. After a day’s rest the gunboat knocked out
the field guns on the east bank, escorted Pope’s troops across, and
Island No. 10, its communications completely gone, had to surrender
with 7,000 men.

Another term had been added to the complex of combined
operations on the rivers. Ships could run past batteries, no matter
how formidable and, once past, could support troops to cut in
behind them.

This was presently reinforced in resounding terms from the other
end of the Mississippi, where old Flag Officer David Glasgow
Farragut brought up a strong fleet of ocean vessels and some
bombardment mortars to try conclusions with the two powerful forts
covering New Orleans. Three days of bombardment failed to tame the
forts; Farragut impatiently ran his ocean-going ships past them,
destroying the Confederate fleet on the lower river in a terrific
battle, and on April 25 anchored off New Orleans. Two days later
the forts surrendered, and the largest city in the Confederacy was
gone.

This was the event that suddenly made the importance of
Vicksburg vital, for after Halleck took Corinth on May 30, the
forts on the upper river became useless; he was behind them. Pillow
and the lesser works were evacuated peacefully on June 4, and two
days later the Union gunboats wiped out the River Defense Fleet off
Memphis. The city surrendered to the navy and became Grant’s
downstream base. Vicksburg was now the only barrier to Union
domination of the whole stream, the only cover for communication
between the east and west Confederacy. The rebels began fortifying
it heavily in April, just after Island No. 10 fell, and neither
effort nor expense was spared.

III

There was a certain amount of misapprehension on both sides, and
at this point the Confederates had already paid for most of theirs.
The thing that bothered Richmond from the beginning was those Union
ironclads on the upper river. The attack on New Orleans from the
sea fell as a stunning surprise, and the defenses were neither
coordinated nor fully prepared. At a date when Farragut’s ships
were already moving up to begin the bombardment, the Confederate
Navy Department sent a stern order that a strong ironclad building
at New Orleans should be sent up to Memphis at once. That is, they
recognized—to late—the defects of the fortress system
in the face of amphibious operations, and tried to make good the
deficit by supporting the forts with floating defense. But the
floating defenders were now all gone except the ram
Arkansas, which had been towed down from Memphis and then up
the Yazoo River for completion. There was nothing left to do but
try to make the fortress system work through better control of the
inland areas behind. The process was sensibly aided by the fact
that all available forces could be concentrated in support of the
only major fortress remaining, and by the lack of a good water
route leading to the rear of that fortress.

On the Union side there was still comparatively little
understanding of the fact that success had really been due to
combined operations. Halleck’s army at Corinth had had quite as
much to do with the movement of the gunboats down past forts
Pillow, Randolph, and Harris as the gunboats had with the fall of
Island No. 10. It was too easily assumed, on the basis of both
river operations and successes along the coast, that no sort of
fort could stand up against ships with heavy guns. Farragut at New
Orleans received very positive orders to go upstream and help the
gunboat fleet take Vicksburg. The only military support allotted
consisted of 3,000 men from the New Orleans occupation command.

It was somewhat unrealistic to expect this force to climb the
200-foot bluffs of Vicksburg in the face of the defenders, who now
amounted to an army, and the unreality was compounded by the fact
that the deep-draft, long, unarmored ocean vessels were about as
unsuited for work in a winding river filled with uncharted snags
and sand bars as any ships could well be. Farragut went up,
nevertheless, and after numerous groundings and accidents, was just
south of Vicksburg on June 25 and in communication across the
isthmus opposite the place with Flag Officer C. H. Davis, now
commanding the gunboat squadron. The mortars that had bombarded the
New Orleans forts were brought up to shell the batteries, and on
the night of the twenty-eighth Farragut’s fleet ran fighting
through to join the gunboats at the mount of the Yazoo, just above
the town.

Now the operation rapidly turned to failure in spite of the
ships’ not being much hurt. Against the midnight hills the ships
had to fire at flash and they obviously did no damage to speak of.
As for the river gunboats, they were ocean again facing plunging
fire, as at Donelson, Columbus, and Pillow, and could do no more
than assure the communications and cover the flanks of an army that
was not there. For two weeks the naval commanders discussed the
situation, then sparked apart, Farragut back through the batteries
to New Orleans, Davis to base at Helena, Arkansas.

It was merely one of those ventures into the domain of the
fantastic in which the Civil War is so rich that the vent which
touched off the splitting of the fleets was the wholly unexpected
appearance of the ram Arkansas from the Yazoo, running
through the combined squadrons to anchor under the guns of
Vicksburg. Her career lasted just twenty-three days. When she tried
to go down and supply naval support for a Confederate army attack
on Baton Rouge, her engines gave out in the presence of Union
gunboats and the crew had to burn her up. But the Vicksburg
fortress had fulfilled its mission so well that the Confederates
now built another farther down at Port Hudson to keep the ocean
ships from coming back, and to hold open communications with the
West via the Red River.

The leading military event of the late summer and early fall in
the West was Confederate Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky. Troops were
drawn off from Grant to help against this move until he had barely
30,000 in his mobile force, and this with the railroad supply line
from Columbus to Corinth to cover. In October, Grant decided to
take the offensive, Bragg’s invasion having been turned back at
Perryville, a Confederate force having been defeated at Corinth,
and word having arrived that new troops were coming downstream to
Memphis, as well as some reinforcements from the trans-Mississippi.
His line was down the Mississippi Central Railroad, which projects
from Corinth to reach the rear of Vicksburg at the junction of
Jackson. The plan was this: Grant was to move down the railroad
line, rebuilding destructions as he went, while Sherman picked up
the new troops at Memphis, came downstream in transports and, with
the help of the gunboats, attacked the Chickasaw Bluffs just north
of the mouth of Yazoo. The Confederates did not have force enough
to be strong both against Grant’s advance and the bluffs; one of
these attacks should break through, communication with the rivers
from the high ground would be established, and a campaign against
Vicksburg from the rear begun.

This plan ignored two factors, one of which was not immediately
apparent. The Confederates had become very alarmed about the safety
of their fortress, and had appointed General Joe Johnston to
command the whole area west of the Alleghenies; he built up the
forces under General John C. Pemberton in the Vicksburg area to a
strength that permitted freedom of movement. As Grant pushed down
his railroad line, reaching a point over 200 miles from his major
base at Columbus, he established an advanced depot of stores at
Holly Springs, east of Memphis, and unconnected with that town
except by inefficient wagon tracks, the railroad connection having
long since gone. On December 20, the day Sherman’s expedition left
Memphis for downstream, the Confederate cavalry of Van Dorn fell on
the Holly Springs depot, burned it out and, with the help of other
cavalry raiders, tore up many miles of track toward Columbus. Grant
had to go back to Memphis at once, the troops marching on
three-quarter rations, and there was no way to tell Sherman what
had happened, since the wires were down and a letter would have to
reach Memphis before proceeding downstream.

The consequence was that Pemberton was quite free to concentrate
against Sherman and did so, bloodily beating off his attack when
the gunboats proved no more capable of dealing with artillery on
high bluffs than they had ever been. The essential fact was that
this was the mirror image of the naval attempt on Vicksburg in
June, not really a combined operation. Sherman’s men were carried
by ships and supported by them, but this was an amphibious attack,
quite a different thing. At no time was Grant’s own striking force
in touch with or aided by the fleet. In a country so wide and
generally flat as the Mississippi valley, communications that did
not travel a great deal of the distance by water could be protected
only at ruinous cost in detachments.

IV

When Grant reached Memphis after a hard march, he made the
appalling discovery of the second factor of ignorance. Back in
September one of his corps commanders, John A. McClernand, had gone
to Washington on leave. This was a politician who had been
commissioned out of civil life; a Democrat from Illinois of
outstanding loyalty to the Union and somewhat more outstanding
loyalty to his own advancement. In the capital he told Lincoln that
it would be easy for a man of his popularity to recruit an entirely
new army in Indiana, Illinois, and Opwa for a campaign down the
river against Vicksburg. The recruiting problem was becoming
serious, the word "draft" was being mentioned and it was rather a
dirty word. Lincoln was persuaded to give McClernand a secret order
empowering him to command an "Army of the Mississippi." McClernand
performed the recruiting part of his mission very well; many of the
levies that came to Memphis were of his provision. But many also
were not, and neither were the troops from the trans-Mississippi or
the other formations Grant had left with Sherman. All the same,
McClernand turned up at the bluffs of the Yazoo just after the
repulse, brandished his secret order and, in virtue of it, not only
assumed command of half Grant’s army, but went off with it up the
Arkansas on a private expedition against a fort there.

Of course the command arrangement was straightened out after a
somewhat acrid exchange of telegrams with Washington, and
McClernand returned to his position as a corps commander under
Grant. But the operative fact was that Grant now had to go down to
the lower river base at Young’s Point and take command in person,
with enough troops from the inland expedition to make it clear that
this was no McClernand’s army but his own. At this point the
politics of strategy entered the picture. The news of the dreadful
defeat at Fredericksburg had just shaken the North, and it came on
the heels of the failure of the Lincoln party in the fall
elections. If Grant now brought all his troops back to Memphis and
replanned an overland campaign, it would be an admission of defeat
and the effect might well be disastrous. Grant was perfectly
conscious of this and of the fact that although the setback had
really taken place, it was vitally important not to let people know
about it. McClernand’s action had thus politically committed him to
a campaign against Vicksburg from the low west bank.

In itself there was nothing wrong with this. It ensured another
combined operation, and Grant had become rather partial to working
with the gunboats, now under command of the vain, irascible,
dynamic, and able David Porter. But it imposed a virtually
insoluble problem of means and communications. Below Vicksburg, all
the way to Port Hudson and beyond, the highlands follow the east
bank of the stream. It would be possible to march an army down the
west bank and win a crossing by one of the methods established in
the military art since the days of Gustavus Adolphus, but once
across, how would that army maintain itself? On the basis of
previous experience, the armored warships could be expected to run
through the batteries with an acceptable amount of loss, but there
were needed vessels that could provide a steady flow of supplies
for over 30,000 men, ships making round trips. It was idle to
suppose that such thin-shelled craft could work back and forth past
those heights which daily grew more formidable.

Thus Grant’s problem was to secure logistic support for a move
across the river to some spot south of Vicksburg. The first attempt
(on a suggestion from Washington) was by digging a canal across the
neck of the land opposite the city. Grant never had much faith in
it, and it never produced more than enough water to float a
rowboat, while the Confederates set up new batteries opposite the
exit, but it did keep the people busy during an uncomfortable
winter in the Louisiana lowlands.

The next attempt was double. South of Memphis the high ground
slants wide to the eastward before turning back to touch the
Mississippi again at Vicksburg, forming the great diamond-shaped
area of marshy flatland, cut by slow-paced watercourses, known as
the Yazoo delta—nearly 200 miles long, nearly fifty miles
broad, across which troops cannot march. The rivers of the eastern
high ground flow west before they break through to attach
themselves to the Yazoo in this delta. With the coming of January
and freshet water it should be possible to shoot gunboats into the
maze of streams in the delta, win a way into one of the
westward-flowing streams where it breaks the highlands, and there
establish a beachhead fed by naval support.

Far up the line a levee closed an old gap called Yazoo Pass,
where the Mississippi had earlier annually flowed through into the
Coldwater River and thence the Yazoo. This levee was blown on
February 3, 1863, and four days later, the flood having reached
sufficient height, eight light gunboats passed in, with transports
carrying 800 troops. Overhanging branches and underwater
obstructions tore at them and slowed progress; the Confederates got
word of the movement and had time to erect a brand-new fort at the
mouth of the Tallahatchie, surrounded by waters so that it would
not be taken from the land side. The stream was so narrow that only
two gunboats could approach at a time; they proved nowhere near
enough to deal with the new fort, the commander of the Union
expedition went insane, and it miserably pulled out.

While this was still undecided, Admiral Porter in person, with a
squadron of ironclads, was trying to work through the maze of
bayous and rivers from near the mouth of the Yazoo to reach high
ground north of the bluffs that had stopped Sherman. He had better
luck than the Yazoo Pass expedition in encountering no forts; and
worse, in that at a critical point in his progress he encountered a
stream-barring bed of underwater willows which his ships could not
break through. Confederate snipers attacked him from the banks; he
had to unship rudders and drift downstream to safety, and the only
gain of the expedition was a pair of fine turkeys for General
Sherman’s table.

There was, then, no way of reaching the Vicksburg high ground
via the Yazoo delta, and while these projects were under way,
another canal effort failed. West of the main stream was an old
course named Lake Providence, which it seemed might be deepened to
lead into the Red River below Vicksburg. The channel was cut; Lake
Providene flooded indeed, but then ran out into marshes and there
was no passage for ships. By mid-April people in Washington were
condemning Grant in unmeasured terms, and there was still no
visible means of furnishing an army with logistic support for an
advance along the high ground on which Vicksburg stood. The general
asked Porter whether he could run enough gunboats through the
batteries to cover a crossing and, being told yes, gave orders for
the army to march down the right bank.

There was a great moment during that march, the moment when
William Tecumseh Sherman sat beside Grant on a log and asked what
he meant to do.

"Cross here and reach the high ground," said Grant.

Sherman said, "That would be putting yourself voluntarily in a
position which the enemy would be glad to maneuver a year to get
you in." He urged that Grant should go back to Memphis,
fortify, build a road. Grant heard him out and said shortly, "The
country is tired of retreats. I shall cross here."

Sherman said, "But your communications? You cannot get
supplies down the west bank."

"No communications. We will live off the country."

At the time Sherman said nothing at all, only stared, he was too
amazed to do more, but later he was to remark, "I am a better
general than he is, but I lack his iron nerve."

V

There was no precedent for any such thing since Napoleon’s first
campaign in Italy, and even this was not a solid precedent, since
the Corsican cut loose from one line of supply only long enough to
uncover a new one. It would be utter disaster for Grant and the
country if he failed, and the elements of failure were present. He
had not over 41,000 men in the three corps of McClernand,
McPherson, and Sherman, while Pemberton had at least 40,000 in the
Vicksburg area, and Joe Johnston was eastward in range with unknown
but formidable numbers. When the gunboats ran through the batteries
with seven transports to test matters, only one of the latter was
sunk, but several were reduced to barges that had to be towed, and
the first attempt to shoot out a foothold at Grand Gulf ended in a
beating for the ships. There could be no turning back; and if the
army failed, the ships were faced with the prospect of being caught
in a steadily narrowing area of fire from high places.

But Grant gave himself every chance for success. The initial
crossing was made by the corps of McClernand and McPherson at
Bruinsburg, well south of any fortified point and three miles from
the foot of the bluffs, a place where surprise could be achieved.
Sherman stayed behind temporarily at the mouth of the Yazoo with
several gunboats to make a noisy demonstration toward the bluffs
where he had been hurled back before. This worked; Pemberton
shifted some of his strength in that direction and did not even
begin to change arrangements until he heard of what was happening
farther south.

The news was the landing of McClernand’s whole corps, 16,000
men, at four on the afternoon of April 30, with three days’ rations
in their haversacks. Grant, at last on high ground, but with all
the perils yet to come, nevertheless "felt a degree of relief
scarcely ever equalled since" as he watched Illinois, Indiana,
Wisconsin, Iowa swing past, no parade soldiers, but dusty and
competent. The bands did not play; there was only the inexorable
tramp, tramp, tramp of marching men, and after them, the guns. By
twilight the corps was on the cliffs at Port Gibson; at dawn
contact was made with the enemy.

There was a division of some 7,000 men under General Bowen, who
had been in command of the Grand Gulf garrison, and who had, of
course, been advised of the landing as soon as it took place.
Pemberton had spent most of the night getting off telegrams to
assemble his various commands, and off to the east Joe Johnston was
assembling men at Jackson, the obvious point of impact if the
Federal line of advance were prolonged.

The country around Port Gibson is composed of high ridges
slashed by ravines filled with brush and canebrake, admirable for
defense, but McClernand had too many men, and by noon two brigades
of McPherson’s joined him; in a sharp little battle the
Confederates were thrown off northwestward, with 600 prisoners
lost. Near Grand Gulf they were joined by another division
Pemberton sent in support and various scattered groups that brought
Bowen up to 17,000 men. He did not consider Grand Gulf safe, and
got behind the Big Black River, his men much worn with marching. A
division of McPherson’s slashed out to keep him going, the rest of
the Union army pushed on toward Jackson, officers and men working
together in waist-deep water to build bridges. Sherman came
crowding up behind the advance.

They marched. There was no bread, the country was rough and the
roads were bad, but there were local bacon, beef, and molasses, and
by God, they marched; not in the direction of Vicksburg, as
Pemberton was expecting, but toward Jackson. On May 12 at Raymond
more Confederates were encountered, a brigade being called in on
Pemberton from farther south. They were beaten by McPherson and
lost 400 prisoners.

"Its effects were trifling," wired Johnston, but he considered
McPherson’s force a detachment with which the nearly 12,000 men he
had assembled at Jackson could deal, and urged Pemberton to fall on
the rear of Grant’s main body. Pemberton’s main ideas at this point
were that he must not get too far from his base at Vicksburg, but
that if Grant were as far east as Raymond the Union line of
communications back to the river was becoming excessively long. He
therefore stayed generally in situ, shifting his weight
slightly to the right for a blow at that line of communications
when he had a good chance.

Thus both Confederate commanders had an incomplete and
inaccurate picture of what was going on. Actually, as soon as the
Battle of Raymond was won, McPherson shot off leftward to strike
the Jackson-Vicksburg railroad at Clinton, while Sherman moved
straight on Jackson. On the thirteenth McPherson took Clinton and
was between Johnston and Pemberton. It rained in torrents, the
water was often a foot deep as the men marched, but they were in
high spirits, with a taint of victory in the air; they cheered
their general wildly as he rode past. On the fourteenth both
McPherson and Sherman were before Jackson; they assaulted, Sherman
got a division around a flank, Johnston was driven from the town,
with 800 prisoners and seventeen guns lost. He turned north with
what he had left, sending a message to Pemberton to urge that
general to join him in that direction for an attack on Grant’s
rear.

But Grant’s flowing mass of force had no real rear, and
Pemberton was already moving south toward the attack on the
nonexistent line of communications. In addition, Grant got a copy
of the Johnston message, which the Union cryptographers promptly
deciphered. He turned everything toward Pemberton, McPherson from
Jackson with Sherman shoving along behind, McClernand from Raymond.
Fighting contact was made on May 16 at Champion’s Hill—a high
hill slanting southwest to the considerable stream of Baker’s
Creek. McClernand, who was to break through on the left, was
inexcusably tardy in going in, but after four hours of fighting two
of McPherson’s divisions got around and stormed the peak on the
Union right. Ruin spread along the Confederate line and they were
driven from the field in rout. They lost 3,000 in killed and
wounded, 3,000 prisoners, and twenty-four guns. Grant personally
drove McClernand’s men in on their collapsing right so fast that
what was left of a whole Confederate division, unable to find a
ford across Baker’s Creek that was not already in possession of the
Yankees, wandered off far southward to turn up at Mobile.

Grant followed hard. Next morning he found the refugees from the
battle ensconced in a bridgehead at the Big Black. Sherman was
already pressing forward on the right to gain a passage farther up
the stream. The other two corps moved up to the bridgehead, and
just at this moment there arrived before Grant a colonel who had
ridden hard with a telegram from Halleck in Washington, transmitted
through New Orleans. It ordered the disorderly general to return to
his base Grand Gulf. Grant remarked that it was rather late in the
game for that; the colonel started to argue, but just then there
was a burst of cheering on the right, and General Lawler of
McClernand’s command went past in his shirt sleeves, leading a
charge for the bridgehead. It broke right in; the Confederates lost
1,751 more prisoners and eighteen more guns, and by the next night
the coils were closing around Vicksburg and Pemberton was telling
his chief engineer that his career was ended in disaster and
disgrace.

Down on the river the crew of the gunboats looked aloft to see
men in blue capering on those bluffs so long inexpungable. Among
them was Sherman; he turned to Grant and said, "Until this moment I
never believed in your success. But this is a campaign; this
is a success, if we never take the town."

VI

The measure of the success is statistical: in seventeen days
Grant had marched 130 miles, won five battles, put out of action,
killed, or captured 14,000 of Pemberton’s men, taken over sixty
pieces of artillery; his own loss was 2,000. Of course he took the
town; there were six weeks of assaults repulsed, hard bombardment,
exploding mines, and endurance to follow after that meeting of the
generals, but it had become a fully combined operation once more.
Down the river, covered by the navy, there poured an inexhaustible
flood of ammunition, supplies, reinforcements until Grant had
75,000 men in the lines and there was no chance of relief. A few
days after Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, Port Hudson gave
up to a force operating out of New Orleans and the Mississippi
became fully Union territory.

The obvious economic result was that communication between the
Northwest and the Gulf was restored, though it never again regained
the proportional importance it had before the war. The obvious
tactical result was that Pemberton surrendered 30,000 men, which
was more than the Confederacy could afford. The obvious strategic
result was that the Confederacy was cut in two, and not only were
all the forces west of the river almost as effectively out of the
war as though they had been prisoners too, but also the Confederate
east at once began to go hungry for lack of goods from the
producing lands of western Louisiana and Texas. General Dick
Taylor, in command there, remarked that when the Union river
blockade clamped down he had twelve loaded steamers on the Red, on
one of which alone there were 300,000 pounds of bacon for the
eastern armies. None of this, or any other supplies, ever was to
get through.

Vicksburg thus condemned the operative parts of the Confederacy
to slow starvation by completing the iron ring the Union navy had
thrown around the coast. It was a combined operation, but its
effect was to extend the blockade to inland waters. The only real
chance remaining to the seceded states was that of crushing one of
the great northern armies in a battle, and the event which took
place at Gettysburg on the day Pemberton signed the surrender
papers indicated how improbably that was. Of course, there was some
chance also in the political area—that war weariness would
drive the Lincoln government from office in the 1864 election, as
Lincoln himself at one time thought it might. But Vicksburg was
also directly operative in this field, a political as well as a
military victory, a visible evidence of progress; and indirectly it
helped provide the means for the military success which made the
political position secure. Many of the troops who went hammering
into Atlanta behind Sherman at the crisis of the political campaign
were those released from other preoccupations by the fall of
Vicksburg.

In a sense, Atlanta, the Chattanooga battles, the Wilderness
fighting, Cedar Creek may be called decisive. They ruined the
morale and much of the physical equipment of the staggering
Confederacy. But they all rested firmly on the foundation of
Vicksburg, and it is necessary only to ask what would have happened
had Grant been defeated there.

He never received qualitative credit for the accomplishment. The
correspondents could not get their dispatches out during those
terrific seventeen days of marching and fighting, and when it was
all over the victory so stood in the shadow of Gettysburg that
hardly anyone realized that the man usually set down as a dull
plodder was actually a general who hurled troops along the roads at
Napoleonic speed, deceived and bewildered the opposition. The
campaign against Lee in Virginia looks at first sight like mere
hard pounding, but when the details are examined, it contains an
astonishing amount of maneuver. Grant is always pulling a corps
from the right of his line and performing the extremely delicate
operation of bringing it around to the left through the rear areas
of forces already fighting; and it was Grant who conceived the
strategy that brought an end to the war.

There is also something that, if more tenuous, goes rather
deeper. The Revolution left the American army a heritage of
confidence in the aimed fire of the individual infantryman. In the
same way the Vicksburg campaign, as the culmination of a series of
combined operations, left an inbred tradition in favor of this
method of making war. And this was not to be without value some
eighty years later, across the vast reaches of the Pacific and on
the beachheads of Europe.

16. MORE THAN MIDWAY

I

In considering the point at which decision was reached in World
War II, one’s attention is almost irresistibly drawn to the events
of November 1942, when within a few weeks the Germans were driven
from the frontiers of Egypt, the Allies made good their combined
operation against western North Africa, Hitler’s drive into Russia
was crushed at Stalingrad, and Japanese battleships went down in
flames off Guadalcanal. It is possible that the European war was
indeed decided at Stalingrad, but we do not know for certain, and
perhaps we shall never know. The deliberate falsification of
history by both sides was so elaborate and so complete that there
is now not recoverable any account of the operation that makes
military sense. For instance: the German story has been that Von
Paulus was ordered to retreat from the trap and failed to do so;
the Russian story is that he wanted to retreat and was not allowed.
There is equally contradictory testimony on such matters as the
behavior of the Rumanian troops and the efficiency of the Soviet
artillery.

And Stalingrad may also be viewed as a dependent event—the
product of the failure of the tank columns before Moscow in the
bitter winter of 1941. The other battles of the November 1942
series were more obviously the activation of decisions already
reached. None, of course, was strictly inevitable; any one might
have been an Allied defeat. But it was not necessary to the outcome
of the general war that all should have been Allied victories. The
forces mobilized against the Axis were already so tremendous that
if Stalingrad, Alamein, Casablanca, and Guadalcanal had never taken
place substitute decisions must have brought the same result.

A somewhat better case as decisive actions can be made out for
the air battle over Britain in 1940, the failure of the German tank
columns to take Moscow in the winter of 1941, and the Allied
success in overcoming the submarines in ’42 and ’43. But these were
negative decisions, preventive victories; they determined that the
Axis was not going to win in a particular way, but failed to decide
that it could not win at all. That decision was reached when the
industrial power of the United States was released to give full
support to Britain and Russia in Europe and to take the
counteroffensive against Japan. "You want a hundred airplanes for
this mission?" an acute French observer reports an imaginary
American officer saying to his ally. "Wouldn’t a thousand be
better?"

The decision that liberated such forces, that turned the Allies
from a parsimonious defensive to a richly supported attack, was a
battle decision.

II

No comment on the complex Japanese naval command arrangements
and staff planning is necessary beyond remarking that they were
outrageously intricate, and a Japanese plan of campaign was the
result of a kind of badminton game played at Imperial headquarters
with ideas for birds. Documents now available show that after the
success of the "first phase operations" was assured as early as
January 1942 the question of whether to hold an established line or
two continue the offensive against the United States came up; and
the decision worked out in conferences at which admirals argued
with tears running down their cheeks was in favor of the occupation
of Midway Island early in June, when a full moon would make night
landing operations possible.

It would take the entire strength of the "Combined Fleet," which
was in effect the Japanese navy; but it had certain advantages. The
consent of the dominant army people was easy to obtain since it
involved the commitment of only a single regimental combat team of
the forces they were so carefully hoarding; and the United States
fleet would almost certainly be involved, so that what remained of
it could be brought to action and destroyed. That fleet was the
chief preoccupation of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, head of Combined
Fleet, though not of the Naval General Staff, of which he was
theoretically the servant. His intelligence network in Hawaii had
ceased to operate, but he was fully aware that the American battle
line had been smashed at Pearl Harbor. His worry was about the
heavy cruisers and the carrier task forces they supported; and when
Doolittle bombed Tokyo on April 18, all objections to the Midway
plan ceased. Quite apart from strategic considerations, it was an
absolutely intolerable loss of face that any such thing should
happen. Land- or lagoon-based patrol planes must be established to
prevent a repetition.

The plan for the occupation of Midway, with an appendix of the
western Aleutians as a diversionary measure, was therefore
definitely laid on for the full moon in early June. The proponents
of the idea of first severing American communications with
Australia were nevertheless strong enough in the badminton game to
get their plan adopted too; a task force built around two heavy
carriers and one light was accordingly dispatched to secure Port
Moresby in southern New Guinea and Tulagi in the Solomons in
preparation for a more serious movement against New Caledonia, the
Fijis, Samoa in July. In May, while war games were being played at
Japanese headquarters to determine the probable outcome of the
Midway operation, this task force encountered American naval
vessels in the Battle of the Coral Sea. In spite of the fact that
the light carrier was lost, one of the heavies so damaged that she
was barely towed back, and the other deprived of her air groups to
an extent that made her inoperative, the thinking of the Japanese
high command about Midway was not in the least disturbed.

They had positive evidence that two of the big American carriers
had gone down at the Coral Sea. That this evidence turned out to be
spurious did not affect their thinking at the time. The estimate
was that the U.S. fleet had only the carriers Enterprise and
Hornet, and there was a strong possibility that these were
still in the Solomons late in May. To be absolutely certain, the
Japanese made allowance for the possibility that they had come back
north or that Wasp had arrived from the Atlantic and threw
out a double scouting line of submarines off Hawaii to report any
carrier sorties from Pearl Harbor.

Even if the American carriers did come north, even if they were
joined by Wasp, there was little they could accomplish
beyond giving the Japanese the general fleet action Yamamoto
desired after Midway had been taken. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, in
charge of the carrier striking force, had Kaga,
Akagi, Hiryu, and Soryu, the largest in the
Japanese navy; they would launch a surprise air attack on Midway
from 250 miles out, destroying shore installations and any planes
based on the island. Behind them would come the Midway invasion
force, covered by the "Main Force" under Yamamoto in person, to
fight the Americans on the surface as soon as they reacted to the
occupation of Midway. By this time the carriers would have the help
of land-based air-, or at least seaplanes, from the captured
islands. These were counted on merely to soften up the enemy in
preparation for the battleships to step in and deliver the decisive
punch.

The fleet was organized in separate units in a somewhat
complicated fashion. They would operate in mutual support,
according to the tactical system that had yielded such happy
results at Tsushima and had since become classic in the Japanese
service. The essential feature was that Yamamoto could bring into
action no less than eleven battleships and ten heavy cruisers
against an enemy whose gunnery forces were estimated as consisting
of five heavy cruisers at most.

In the north two light carriers would knock out the small
American base at Dutch Harbor, the only one in the area, as a
preparation for occupying Attu, Kiska, and Adak. This would take
place three days before the Midway attack. As the American fleet
might be drawn in that direction, north of Midway, one wing of
Yamamoto’s fleet would slant in that direction during the approach;
once contact was made, the others could close in quickly. Nagumo
would swing out to approach Midway sharply from the northwest, with
Yamamoto behind him. The invasion force would stage from Saipan and
approach Midway from the west-southwest. After the occupation and
the battle Nagumo’s group would go to Truk to prepare for the
occupation of New Caledonia and the Fijis, this in itself a
preparation for bombing raids against eastern Australia, then turn
back to capture Hawaii sometime in August.

The fleet sailed on May 27, "everybody singing war songs at the
top of their lungs."

III

That same day the carrier Yorktown arrived at Pearl
Harbor from Coral Sea, badly damaged internally and leaking. The
estimate of the time necessary to repair her was ninety days; it
was done in two by 1,400 workmen who toiled right around the clock.
The reason for this frantic haste was that ever since 10 May, Naval
Intelligence had been feeding Admiral Chester Nimitz of the Pacific
Fleet most precise information as to the composition and purposes
of the Combined Fleet, information secured chiefly as the result of
having broken the Japanese radio code. At the time Nimitz had the
carriers Enterprise and Hornet and seven heavy
cruisers in addition to Yorktown, and that was all he had.
There was six American battleships ready for service, but they were
in San Francisco, whence they could hardly reach the scene of
action in time, and were a good deal slower than the Japanese ships
of similar class. Nimitz did not count on them; in diametrical
opposition to Yamamoto, he was counting on no gunnery battle at
all.

The ships put out on the last day of May to an area northeast of
Midway under a somewhat peculiar command arrangement. Rear Admiral
Frank Jack Fletcher had his flag in Yorktown and, as senior
officer present, was technically in charge, but he had no air
staff, and most of the real direction of affairs was in the hands
of Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, who had moved up to carriers
from the cruisers. This was "the human machine," visibly cold as
the mountains of the moon, who drank a pint of the strongest black
coffee ever seen every morning and was supplied with a brain that
was a metronome and never ceased its accurate tick. Ashore on
Midway, Captain C. T. Simard was in charge; as soon as Nimitz got
the word of the coming attack, he began reinforcing the land
elements there. The place held a total of 121 planes, including
some army B-17s and a good many navy patrol planes, besides light
bombers and a torpedo unit. The patrol plans were flying day and
night searches up to 700 miles out in all directions on the arcs
west of Midway, but bad weather hampered them much. The shore
defenses had a heavily reinforced marine defense battalion, the two
islands that comprise Midway were ringed with guns and obstacles,
and there were ten motor torpedo boats in the lagoon. Bombproof
shelters were supplied for all hands. A cable connecting Midway
with Hawaii insured that there would be no abnormally heavy radio
traffic to attract Japanese attention.

The sortie of the American ships on May 31 introduced a first
and violent element of error into the Japanese plan. The submarine
scouting line sent to watch for them was not yet in position, so
they saw nothing. As Yamamoto approached Midway through rain and
fog that gave him admirable concealment but made navigation and
communications difficult, he had no positive information whatever
as to the number or whereabouts of the American ships.

There was an arrangement that might have rectified this lack.
The Japanese planned to have Pearl Harbor and its approaches
watched by four-engine flying boats working out of Wotje beyond
their normal range and refueled by submarines at French Frigate
Shoal, between Midway and Hawaii. But they had already tried that
one in March, and when the flying boats then showed up at Pearl,
Nimitz deduced precisely what was going on. The Japanese submarines
that were to refuel planes for the Midway operation found the
approaches to French Frigate Shoal mined and the place crawling
with American patrol craft, so the air scouting program had to be
dropped. Thus Yamamoto had to depend for intelligence on the Naval
General Staff in Tokyo, which continued to advise as to the
possibility that the two American carriers were in the Solomons,
which would deprive him of the chance for a showdown battle with
the United States fleet. He "seemed in unusually low spirits." The
opinion of his staff was that the Imperial fleet would have plenty
of time to deal with the Americans after the occupation of Midway.
They would have 1,100 miles to run from Pearl after they heard the
news of the attack.

IV

The background was now complete; the rest was up to the
operations. Those in the Aleutians achieved next to nothing on
either side. The two light Japanese carriers ran their bombing raid
against Dutch Harbor on June 3 without damaging anything important
or suffering any important damage in return; but when they tried a
second attack, the planes were set on out of the fog by army
fighters, P-40s. This meant that the Americans had in the area an
air base of whose existence there had been no previous report and
of whose location the Japanese had no idea; and the photos taken
during the Dutch Harbor raid showed a far more solid installation
than had been expected. Hosogaya, the admiral in charge, turned
back and settled for Attu and Kiska; Adak would be altogether too
near that new American air base. His effort at drawing American
strength northward had failed because of Nimitz’s prior information
as to the real objective.

The curtain raiser for the big show came at 0900 on the morning
of June 3, when a patrol plane sighted the Japanese invasion force
600 miles southwest of Midway and dogged it for several hours. The
B-17s, which had the range, were sent out to make a high-level
bombing attack in the afternoon. Actually, they hit nothing but, in
a manner that was to be highly characteristic of Army Air during
the entire operation, reported damage to two battleships and a
transport and persuaded Navy to send out a submarine to look for
cripples. During the night four of the big patrol planes took off
with torpedoes under their wings, the first time they had been used
in this way. They ran in on the convoy, loosed torpedoes down a
path of moonlight, and one of them got a hit on a tanker that
caused twenty-three casualties, but the ship was able to maintain
station.

At 0430 on June 4 the Japanese striking force for Midway, 108
planes, took off from Nagumo’s carriers, with the deck crews
shouting the Banzai as each machine cleared; half an hour
later came another 108. The ships were 240 miles from Midway, still
under cloud cover and low visibility. At the same hour a search for
American ships was flown, and Japanese accounts make it clear that
this operation was formal, perfunctory; hardly anyone in the
Japanese fleet expected the Americans to be at sea, far less that
they would be looking for the invaders with violence in their
hearts.

The American ships got the word of enemy carriers present at
0534 from a patrol plane; then successive messages that spoke of
many enemy planes heading for Midway and two Japanese carriers with
battleship cover. As it happened, the reported position of the
Japanese was wrong. A little later Admiral Fletcher, whose ship had
flown the American dawn patrol and who wanted his planes back,
signaled Spruance to proceed southwest with the other two carriers
and strike, promising to follow with Yorktown as soon as
possible.

This was at 0607; and at almost the same moment radar warning
sent every plane off Midway—patrol planes to the rear, out of
trouble, a marine fighter group to attack the incoming Japanese, a
formation of six navy torpedo planes, another of marine dive
bombers, four army B-26s carrying torpedoes, and sixteen of the
B-17 Flying Fortresses, all for the counterattack.

At the island the Japanese came in through what they described
as fierce anti-aircraft fire, burned out a hangar and a fuel tank,
blew up a storehouse which scattered packages of cigarettes all
over the island, and did assorted damage to other aboveground
installations. In the air their tactically superior, too numerous
Zero fighters made mincemeat of the marine squadron, fifteen of
whose twenty-seven did not return. But the attackers did little
damage to the airstrips, caused only twenty casualties, and they
were sadly surprised at not obtaining surprise and catching
American planes on the ground. As the attackers soared back to
their carriers with the black plume of the burning fuel tank
beneath, the air group leader radioed, "There is need for another
attack. Time: 0700."

He was perfectly right; not even an invasion force supported by
battleships and heavy cruisers could readily have struck home
against the shore installations remaining. But a decisive factor in
what happened next was the failure of the land-based Midway planes.
The torpedo carriers came first; they got not a single hit and only
three out of ten came back, two of which crash-landed. Then came
twenty-seven dive bombers, half of them shot down, again without
damage to the ships; and the B-17s, whose efforts produced nothing
but boasts from the army air force. At 0715 the land-based air
attacks from Midway were over and not a Japanese ship had been
damaged. This carried conviction to Admiral Nagumo; the Americans
were not going to hurt him, and their Midway base needed another
strike. He had on the decks of his carriers ninety-three planes
armed with torpedoes and armor-piercers on the off chance that
enemy surface forces might be encountered. Now these were taken
down to the hangars to be rearmed with fragmentation bombs for the
second strike on Midway.

While this was going on, there came a report from a Japanese
cruiser search plane which had taken off belatedly; it had found
five American cruisers and five destroyers, and twenty-five minutes
later it brought the surprising news that there was an American
carrier present. By this time the rearmed planes were on the flight
decks again, and Nagumo had a baby in his lap without an adequate
supply of diapers. The ninety-three were all torpedo-type planes,
which had to fly level for an attack, and the fate of the
unescorted American torpedo planes showed they stood little chance
without fighter cover. But the first wave of Japanese fighters was
just beginning to arrive overhead with the planes of the Midway
strike, low on gas and needing to be taken aboard. The second wave
of fighters was flying combat patrol, and certainly could not
accompany a preventive strike.

Under the circumstances, Nagumo decided to play it safe. He
turned north to get deeper under cloud cover and avoid attack while
the planes of the Midway strike were taken in. The combat patrol
remained up; the planes on the decks were struck below for a second
time, to be rearmed for work against ships. This would give Nagumo
plenty of strength for an attack, but the second reloading was done
so hurriedly that there was not time to send the fragmentation
bombs back to the magazines, so they were arranged in racks on the
hangar decks. It still took time to recover and rearm the planes of
the Midway strike, and the action against the American force of
"five cruisers, five destroyers, and one carrier" was scheduled for
1030.

Spruance originally intended to run southwest until 0900 and
launch his strike 100 miles from the Japanese force, now accurately
located. The news of the attack on Midway changed his mind; if he
launched early, though the distance was so great that he was likely
to lose many planes through running out of gas, he just might catch
the Japs refueling. He launched then, a little after 0700, a full
strike of every operational plane he had, itself a daring decision.
Yorktown, coming along behind, did not launch for more than
another hour, and then only half her planes.

The air squadrons made their getaway in standard formation,
torpedo planes low down, dive bombers higher, and fighters above
all. But Nagumo’s turn north and floating layers of cloud
introduced an element of uncertainty. The Japanese ships were not
where they were expected to be; Hornet’s dive bombers and
fighters swung southeast toward Midway to search for them in that
direction, missed them entirely, and had to put in at the island,
out of the battle for that day. But underneath, Lieutenant
Commander John J. Waldron, with the fifteen planes of
Hornet’s Torpedo 8, saw smoke northwestward; he turned in
that direction and about 0917 made out the four Japanese carriers
in a diamond formation. Nagumo had just finishing recovering his
planes and was again turning toward the Americans to launch his
attack.

Waldron had no fighter cover and had flown so far that he knew
his chances of return were poor, but he bored in. He was promptly
jumped by no less than fifty Zero fighters and ran into a terrific
curtain of flak. Very few of his planes survived to launch
torpedoes, and of those that did, every one was shot down. There
was a single survivor, Ensign George H. Gay, who came up to find a
bag floating free from the wreck of his plane, with a rubber life
raft in it. He hid under a seat cushion to keep out of sight of
low-flying Japanese fighters and from that ringside position saw
the next wave of attack come in.

This was Torpedo 6 from Enterprise, under Lieutenant
Commander Eugene E. Lindsey, which had lost its fighters in the
clouds. Doctrine called for him to wait and attack simultaneously
with the dive bombers, but he was short on fuel. He went in,
therefore, and tragedy of Torpedo 8 was repeated. Zeros and flak
got all but four of his planes, and again there were no hits on the
Japs. The attack was hardly over when Yorktown’s Torpedo 3
arrived; they had fighter escort, but nowhere near enough to meet
the swarming Japanese patrols. Only five planes got torpedoes away
and three of these were shot down; again no Japanese ship was
it.

Thus at a little after 1000 the American torpedo attack had been
utterly suppressed without doing the slightest damage, and only
four of its planes got home to mother. On the Japanese carriers
they were feeling high; deck crews cheered the pilots of fighters
returning for ammunition and patted them on the shoulder. The
radical maneuvering to avoid torpedo attack had prevented getting
planes away, but now it was over; at 1020, Admiral Nagumo gave the
word to launch, and the four carriers turned into the wind, their
decks covered with planes, engines revved up and ready.

V

There were still, however, the thirty-seven dive bombers from
Enterprise under Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky, and
the seventeen from Yorktown under Lieutenant Commander
Maxwell Leslie. The latter had been instructed that if the Japanese
were not in the anticipated position he was to search for them on a
reverse course. McClusky, flying longer, got off on an errant
west-northwest course, but saw a Japanese destroyer beneath the
projected its line of motion. The consequence was that both forces
arrived simultaneously over the Japanese carriers at 1024, while
all their fighters were at the low level, where they had been
demolishing the torpedo planes, in time to treat Ensign Gay on his
rubber raft to such a spectacle as no man had ever seen or would
again.

Back on the American carriers they heard McClusky’s ardent
swearing as the first three bombs missed. Then Kaga was hit
forward of the island, killing everyone on the bridge, hit three
times amidships, with all the planes on deck set afire, and one
bomb penetrating the hangar to the gasoline tanks; she drifted, a
mass of flame. Akagi took two, one a 1,000-pounder just
behind the midship elevator, that sent it drooping into the hangar
as though it were rubber, and all those bombs and torpedoes began
to burn and go off; the other on the port side aft, which left the
armed planes on deck belching flame, smoke, and explosions.
Everything began burning, even the fireproof doors burned down and
the fire mains melted. Soryu took three hits from the
Yorktown planes, one that folded the forward elevator back
against the bridge, two amidships; the whole deck became a sheet of
flame in a matter of seconds and the fires were joined by those
from the hangar so rapidly that "Abandon ship" was ordered in
twenty minutes.

In five minutes of attack the entire complexion of the battle
had changed, and the Japanese no longer had their margin of
superiority.

There remained Hiryu, bearing the flag of Rear Admiral
Tamon Yamaguchi, one of the most highly regarded officers of the
Imperial Navy; at the point of the diamond formation the ship had
been farther north and more under cloud cover than the others and
thus escaped attention during that devastating attack. Nearly a
day’s streaming farther north still were the two light carriers
that had bombed Dutch Harbor. They were already on their way south;
Yamamoto ordered them to speed up to join Hiryu on the
morning of June 5 for a renewal of the battle, which had not gone
well this day, while the battleships and cruisers covering the
occupation force joined his own to press east for a night surface
action and Hiryu launched an attack on what was still
believed to be the only American carrier present.

This happened to be Yorktown. After launching their
attacks the American carriers turned southeast and away into the
wind to recover planes, but Fletcher’s flagship was still some
distance behind the others and was being dogged by a search plane
from a cruiser shortly after the three Japanese carriers began to
burn. Yamaguchi launched eighteen dive bombers, with six fighters
for cover, at 1100; two hours later (it takes time to ready these
strikes) ten torpedo planes took off with another six fighters. It
would be just after noon when the first wave reached
Yorktown, which was just preparing to take in her own dive
bombers. They were waved off to land on Enterprise; fighters
and escort took on the attackers and knocked down all but five, but
the ship was hit three times by 500-pounders.

The fires they set were quickly brought under control, but the
third bomb disabled two boilers and snuffed out the fires in
others, so that the big carrier gradually ground to a stop. The
damage control parties worked hard; by 1340 they had the ship up to
eighteen knots again, but at 1430, when the torpedo attack came in,
she still did not have her full speed and maneuverability, and
though five of the torpedo planes and three of the fighters were
shot down, Yorktown took two torpedo hits that cut off all
power and gave her a deadly list. "Abandon ship" was ordered, and
only salvage parties were aboard when she was finished off by a Jap
submarine on the morning of June 7.

But while Yorktown was taking it, two important things
happened. One was the return to Hiryu of a new type search
plane, sent out earlier, whose radio had failed. The pilot verbally
brought the news that instead of a single American carrier there
were three, Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet,
two of which were not supposed to be there and one of which was
supposed to be at the bottom of the Coral Sea. The second event was
that before Yorktown was knocked out Admiral Fletcher
ordered a wide ten-plane search. At 1445, after three hours of
hunting, it found Hiryu, and at 1530, Spruance (now in
command, since Fletcher was aboard a cruiser) launched a strike of
twenty-four dive bombers, a mixed group from all the carriers, with
McClusky leading.

It had no fighter cover, but aboard Hiryu there were only
six fighters left; their pilots had been working since before dawn
and were at the utmost limit of exhaustion. When McClusky’s planes
roared in at 1703, there was practically nothing but anti-aircraft
fire to oppose them and they landed four hits in the bridge area.
The whole foredeck was peeled back, all forms of control were lost,
and gigantic fires began to run through the ship. Like the others,
she was doomed, but it was not until dawn that she went down; all
three of the others were under water by 1925.

During the night Admiral Yamamoto underwent a change of heart.
He had been steaming east, still hoping for that night surface
engagement, but as the constellations streamed past and
intelligence slowly ironed out the details of the shimmering
picture, it became more and more likely that instead he would have
a dawn attack from those dive bombers that had wrecked his four
beautiful carriers; there were no contact reports and the Americans
appeared to be retiring eastward. (This was perfectly correct;
Spruance had not the slightest intention of fighting Japanese
surface forces at night, when his carriers could not operate, but
still desirous of being in position to break up a dawn landing,
turned west again at midnight.) The Americans clearly still
had two big carriers operative; Yamamoto’s own light carriers would
not reach the scene until too late and, with the attrition their
air groups had taken in the Aleutians, would be no match for
Enterprise and Hornet even if Yorktown were
badly used up, as his flyers claimed. At two in the morning he
signaled the powerful squadron of four new heavy cruisers that were
to have bombarded Midway during the night to give up the idea; at
0253 he turned westward himself and the conquest was abandoned.
Next morning he sat on the forebridge of the largest battleship in
the world, sipping rice gruel with a pale face and staring eyes.
Few men have come down farther in twenty-four hours.

But Yamamoto was not yet through with Spruance. When the heavy
cruiser squadron began its retreat during the night, it both saw
and was spotted by an American submarine. The admiral in charge
ordered a sharp simultaneous turn away, but the last ship in line,
Mogami, did not get the signal soon enough. She came so
violently in contact with the stern of Mikuma, next ahead,
that Mogami’s bow was all staved in. She could not make more
than sixteen knots, and dawn of June 5 found her pushing westward
with the slightly damaged Mikuma and two destroyers in
company, a good deal to the south of Yamamoto’s main body, which
now comprised practically all the other ships present. A patrol
plane sighted the two cruisers; the B-17s went out from Midway but,
as usual, accomplished nothing, this time because they could not
find the ships. There were six of the marine planes left at Midway;
they were sent out also, picked up an oil slick and charged in, a
glide-bombing attack, the only kind they could make. The flak was
so heavy that it bounced them around and spoiled their aim, but
when Captain Richard E. Fleming’s plane was hopelessly hit, he
crash-landed on Mikuma’s No. 4 turret, and a damaging hit
that was. It spread fire over the air intake to the starboard
engine room, brought about a fume explosion that killed everyone in
the compartment and disabled the engine itself, so that both
cruisers were now cripples.

Spruance was not involved in this attack. At dawn on June 5 he
was still without assurance that Hiryu had gone down, and
late reports from patrol planes seemed to indicate that she was
still afloat. The weather was thick; it was afternoon before a
strike of fifty planes could be flown, and all they found was a
single destroyer, dispatched by Nagumo to pick up Hiryu
survivors. They attacked her, with the worst luck of any strike
flown during the battle; she shot down one plane and was not
hurt.

The Japanese main body was now out of range, but the damaged
cruisers were not and Spruance held on after them all night,
launching the first of three strikes before dawn. The cruisers had
no cover but their potent anti-aircraft fire, and the planes hit
them hard. Mogami got a bomb that penetrated a turret and
killed everyone within, and another that sealed a burning engine
room and killed ninety men. Mikuma took six hits from heavy
bombs, fires raged through the ship, her own torpedoes exploded,
and finally a magazine went. She sank about noon; most of the
survivors were killed by another bomb as they stood on the deck of
a destroyer. Mogami escaped, but in such shape that she
could not put to sea again for two years.

That was the Battle of Midway. Spruance was getting so close to
range of land-based planes from Wake that he turned back.

VI

The battle has been subjected to more detailed analysis than any
other sea fight except Jutland, and deservedly, for it was one of
the two naval battles in American history in which the distinctly
inferior force won crushingly. (Lake Champlain was the
other.) It is easy to make a catalogue of Yamamoto’s
mistakes. He was the great apostle of aviation in the Japanese
navy, the man who organized the Pearl Harbor attack as a purely
naval air operation, yet here he assigned the carriers to a
secondary role and tried to do everything with his battle line. The
heavy ships were not even near enough to furnish gunnery cover for
the carriers—and it is to be remembered that later in the war
no carrier that had a battleship in company was sunk.

The fact that the Americans had cracked the Japanese code was
not properly Yamamoto’s fault, of course, but the fact that he
failed to allow for so many of their carriers’ being in the area
is; and this was doubly compounded by the failure to take any
precautions against the chance of their being there. A submarine
scouting line is very useful but, in the nature of things, not
infallible; they cannot see very far and are apt to be driven
underwater just when it is most important that they should be
seeing. When the air reconnaissance via French Frigate Shoal
failed, Yamamoto should have realized that there was a large area
of ocean in which he knew absolutely nothing about American
movements, and that area included the space it was most vital for
him to know about.

Nagumo shares the fault here. His dawn search of June 4 employed
far too few planes and they did not go far enough. Japanese sources
place the fundamental blame on a doctrine that called for all
possible planes to be used for attack instead of for search; and
behind that on an arrogance that made a fatally easy assumption of
victory, because everything had previously gone well in their
campaigns. Even Coral Sea did not disturb this complacency; at
Combined Fleet headquarters it was counted a victory on the basis
of the two American carriers sunk, and Admiral Inouye, who ordered
the withdrawal, received a severe wigging for not pressing on.

So the Japanese allowed themselves to be surprised because they
felt too strong to be surprised. But there is no negative without a
positive, and on the positive side of the American victory there is
not only the work of the cryptographers, who laid the foundation
for the whole business, but also the speed and thoroughness with
which the information was exploited. There may have been
complacency in American councils before Pearl Harbor; there
certainly was none at the date when Yorktown’s repairs were
rushed through in forty-eight hours of round-the-clock work or
Nimitz’s provision for moving every available form of force up to
Midway; or in the continual painstaking searches flown by American
planes. The afternoon search that located Hiryu after the
other Jap carriers were already fatally hurt, after the American
planes had been flying and fighting since before daybreak, actually
contained more planes and covered a wider area than Nagumo’s search
at dawn, before he had any information at all.

That is, the Americans took pains and the Japanese were too
confident to take them. At first sight there seems also an element
of luck involved in the opportune arrival of the dive bombers over
the Japanese fleet at the precise moment when their attack would
prove fatal. But luck will not explain the fact that Spruance
cleared his decks in expectation that he would catch the Midway
strike returning. It was, rather, bad luck that the American
torpedo planes, through one accident or another, had to go in
piecemeal, without fighter cover and uncoordinated with the
bombers. The basic planning and tactics were sufficiently good too
for such an onset of unfavorable circumstance. Later in the war the
American forces had some luck, for example the single torpedo that
sank the giant carrier Taiho at the Philippine Sea; but
there was none of that elusive component at Midway.

And the battle ruined Japan, as the title of a Japanese book
about it says. Nobody on the American side realized it, even though
Admiral Nimitz delivered himself of a pun about being "Midway to
victory" in his communique. But the Japanese realized it, at least
at the topmost level. Even their official documents glossed over
the matter, even within the Japanese navy it was almost treason to
discuss what really happened. Nagumo’s air officer, who escaped
wounded, was taken from the rescue ship by night in a covered
litter and held incommunicado in a hospital for weeks until it was
certain he would not talk; and he was not the only one subjected to
isolation for fear the dreadful secret might leak. But it was not a
secret from Yamamoto; he now knew that he could not gain his
decisive victory before the industrial power of the United States
was cast into the scale.

Not only were the four carriers so nearly irreplaceable that
their loss caused a revision of the entire Japanese ship-building
program, to the detriment even of the escorts that were so bitterly
needed when the American submarines got to work. This was serious
enough, deadly enough, but the control of the sea air was more. At
the hour when the battle was fought, there were already nine new
United States carriers on the way against two for Japan, and the
latter could never catch up after the Midway subtractions. Not only
was there a crippling and unforeseen loss of planes. The sinking of
the carriers cost the Japanese 250 of them, and the naval air
squadrons that were supposed to have a one-third reserve suddenly
had no reserve at all.

But the most serious loss was among the pilots who were shot
down or killed when the bombs fell among the planes ready for
flight on the carrier decks. It can be said that the Japanese would
have come out of the battle better if they had never tried to make
the attack on Yorktown at all, even though they eventually
sank her. They spent too many pilots.

Before the war there was opinion and even a certain number of
flat statements that "the Japanese do not make good aviators." At
Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, and Midway this seemed to be disproved.
The Japanese flyers there yielded nothing to the Americans in any
aspect of their art. But in the long run the prewar statement
turned out to be true. The Japanese made good flyers only after
careful selection and prolonged training under experienced men,
much longer training than that required by American aviators, and
at Midway the seed corn was eaten up. The indispensable teachers
and squadron leaders with combat experience were shot down or went
down with their ships, and in spite of the desperate combats that
some of the new men later waged in the Solomons, the service never
recovered. New men were trained to fly after a fashion, but it was
not a good fashion, and two years after Midway, 404 of them were
shot down in a morning at the Philippine Sea, when Spruance
collected his dividend on the investment he made on June 4,
1942.

BIBIOGRAPHY FOR
FURTHER READING

It would be impudent (and imprudent) to attempt a thorough
bibliography for a book which covers most of the course of recorded
history, but some indication of sources used and places where
further information can be found by anyone interested may not be
out of place.

For Alexander the Great the sources are very good, considering
the lapse of time and the disappearance of the works of so many
ancient authors. Arrian is the chief one, and though he wrote some
time after the events he chronicles, he had the great advantage of
having before him the memoirs of two of Alexander’s generals,
Ptolemy and Aristobulus. Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Curtius, and
Justin have also given connected accounts of Alexander, and though
they often used inferior source material, they just as often check
on each other, so that it is fairly easy to get at what went
on.

As to Pyrrhus, the sources are just as bad as they are good for
Alexander. The books of Livy that cover the period are among the
lost; Diodorus does not supply much, and Polybius hardly anything.
Dionysius of Helicarnassus and Hieronymus give accounts, but only
in flashes; the main reliance among the ancients is Plutarch.
Colonel T. A. Dodge (Hannibal) went over the battlefields
and worked out the course of events with a keen military eye.

G. P. Baker’s Justinian is a tower of light for anyone
dealing with the period. Of course, he based on some secondary
sources, such as Gibbon and J. H. Bury’s History of the Later
Roman Empire, which have also been used here. The basic
original sources are Marcellinus and Procopius. Delbruck
(Geschichte der Kriegskunst) is too much of a debunker by
half, but useful on details of arms and equipment.

Most of the ultimate sources for Kadisiyah are Muslim chronicles
and, besides being romantic and highly mendacious, they have little
regard for either figures or dates. The best is that of Al Tabari,
written in the ninth century, and translated in the Journal of
the American Oriental Society. Modern writers have done a good
deal of emendation and deduction; those in the Cambridge
Medieval History are worth reading, and also Huart’s Ancient
Persia and Iranian Civilization and Sir Percy Sykes’ History
of Persia.

The excellent papers in the Cambridge Medieval History
are most of the background for Las Navas de Tolosa. The Spanish
chronicles are windy and picturesque, without thorwing a great deal
of light, but they have been winnowed by several English authors,
notably George Power (History of the Empire of the Musselmans in
Spain and Portugal), H. E. Watts (The Christian Recovery of
Spain), and Stanley Lane-Poole (The Moors in Spain).

An excellent book, The Sieges of Vienna, was translated
from the German of Karl Schwimmer "and other sources" by the Earl
of Ellesmere. R. B. Merriman’s Suleiman the Magnificent is
worth a look, as is Eversley’s Turkish Empire. An article on
Salm by Johann Newald appeared in the Verein fur Geschichte der
Stadt Vien, Berichte.

As for Leyden, J. L. Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic
still stands up after nearly a century, and he went so thoroughly
into the original sources that no one need do so again. Also see
Frederick Harisson’s William the Silent and Avermaete’s
Les Gueux de Mer.

Gustavus Adolphus, by Colonel T. A. Doge, is a
first-class military work. Behind it stand a number of other
sources, one of the better being C. V. Wedgwood’s Thirty Years’
War, a book of the same title by Anton Gindely, and Bryce,
The Holy Roman Empire. The quotations are from George
Fleetwood’s Letter to His Father, which was not dug up and
published in the Camden Miscellany until 1847.

For Frederick the Great nobody is quite up to Carlyle, even at
this date. His research was enormous and painstaking, and he is
surprisingly good on military detail. Dorn’s Competition for
Empire is also good. Most readers will not want to bother with
the numerous German sources.

Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe is, of course, the classic
for Quebec. The general background is nicely covered by Dorn’s
Competition for Empire, naval and strategic matters by
Mahan’s Influence of Seapower upon History, and Types of
Naval Officers, while there is excellent detail on both Quebec
and Quiberon Bay in the monumental History of the Royal
Navy, edited by W. Laird Clowes.

On the American Revolution the best authorities are F. V.
Greene’s American Revolution and Douglas Southall Freeman’s
huge George Washington. Naval matters are covered by Mahan
and Clowes, mentioned above, and the Histoire de la Marine
Francaise of Rene Jouan.

The literature of the Napoleonic period is so huge that even
compiling a supplementary reading list from it is a formidable
task. The present author has covered the military and naval
background in two books, Empire and the Sea and Empire
and the Glory.

The literature of the American Civil War is almost as extensive
as that devoted to Napoleon. But Grant’s Personal Memoirs
may be mentioned, also a recent volume by E. S. Miers, Web of
Victory. More nearly contemporary are F. V. Greene’s The
Mississippi, and Battles and Leaders of the Civil
War.

Further reading on Midway can be done in S. E. Morison’s
Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions, a part of his
history of the naval war; also Fuchida and Okumiya, Midway: the
Battle that Doomed Japan, and the interrogations of Japanese
naval officers, an official publication.